Well, there are 80-gazillion utilities out there that will clean up your disk, clean your system registry and do all sorts of things to make your computer purr. But for the cost, System Mechanic really shines and it has a couple of telecommunication features which are absolutely the best I have seen out there.
   We won't talk a lot here about duplicate file removal, cleaning temporary and junk files. There are a lot of programs that do that. Let us just say that System Mechanic does this things as well as anything we have seen. And that is saying a lot because there are a lot of utilities to do just that. I will say System Mechanic found a 1.2 gigabyte file several other programs missed (probably because of its location) and saved me, well, a whole gig of space.
   What I do want to say a few words about, however, is the startup manager in System Mechanic. You can get a dumbed-down version of this with Windows itself, but there are things that are missing there which can be a real pain. Decide you don't need to start up something pretty important and it is possible Windows won't boot. Getting it back can be fun: usually involving a visit to the infamous Safe Mode, which, besides taking time really messes up your screen display.
   You can trust your car to the System Mechanic. And your Windows, too. What is especially nice about this display (which we have only partly reproduced here) is that System Mechanic shows you the entire path of the program as well as what it does. Further over, it also shows where the program comes from in the registry.
   The sum total of this is you get a lot better idea of what some of these programs are. Chances are you are loading stuff (and taking up memory) with things you don't need. This happens for a variety of reasons, chief among them when an uninstaller does a poor job. If you see a driver or something for a program you got rid of six months ago, you can disable it. The really nice thing about it? It doesn't take if off your disk, it just disables it.
   But what is most helpful, in my opinion, is a very, very nifty optimization utility for your internet connection. First off, you can see how well your connection is working, second, you can have System Mechanic change things around. You can even make changes yourself but don't do this unless you know what you're doing. However, System Mechanic can also reapply your default information with one click.
   The chart above was done with this web site. Yes, that is right, you can load a web you're wanting to check and see how fast your connection works.
   As high speed access becomes more and more prevalent, the need for such utilities which work with high speed connections such as cable and DSL is greater. System Mechanic not only works with high speed connections, it optimizes for them, too. I can tell you it speeded up my connections fast enough to notice.
   I know those of you with 14.4 and 28.8 modems will think the session shown in the chart to the left is great, but for a cable modem it is pretty poor. We ran the diagnotics in System Mechanic after taking this reading and increased throughput by 25 percent. Still not great for cable, but, obviously, the site we were looking at (one of the major gateways) had some problems right about then. That is beside the point: the point is System Mechanic increased throughput.
   Since pricing begins at $59.95, it is hard to beat this one.

   Link to the Iolo web site.