NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, August 2007
Advanced WindowsCare Personal Edition – FREEWARE
By Ira Wilsker, APCUG Director;
Columnist, The Examiner, Beaumont, TX; Radio & TV Show Host

Iwilsker@apcug.net
(click to email author)


WEBSITES:
http://www.iobit.com
http://www.iobit.com/advancedwindowscareper.html

A lot can go wrong with the software and operating systems on our computer. Just like a car, if maintenance is ignored or infrequently performed on Windows, problems can occur that can impair the execution of software on our computers. To help us perform the software maintenance on our computers, a small software company IOBIT has released a freeware version of its Windows repair utility, Advanced WindowsCare Personal Edition. For those concerned about the safety and security of free software, this product is free of any spyware or adware.

Available for free download from the publisher’s site, http://www.iobit.com, or the alternative popular mega sites including download.com, and tucows.com, Advanced WindowsCare Personal Edition is a comprehensive suite of utilities that can identify and repair many of the common system problems that plague Windows users. Advanced WindowsCare will run on Windows 2000, XP, and Vista. For those who may desire an even more powerful and sophisticated suite, IOBIT also has an upgrade available, Advanced WindowsCare Professional, which sells for $29.95 (15 day free trial available). The free Personal Edition has been very successful, with over four million downloads, including over two million from download.com alone. C-Net, the owner of download.com, calls this software, the “#1 most popular system utility in download.com”, where it has received a five star rating. Tucows has given this software a “five cows” rating, while ZD Net has awarded it five stars, as well as given it its coveted “Editors’ Pick” award. Softpedia, another well known resource, rates Advanced WindowsCare Personal “Very Good”, and gives it a four star rating. Obviously, this appears to be some good software that can make a valuable addition to anyone’s software collection.

Advanced WindowsCare Personal Edition is very easy to use, and offers a “1 click” option where all of the major utilities are automatically run, which subsequently gives a detailed report to the user, and offers the options to either automatically or selectively repair any problems found. Personal Edition is also very fast, with most scans being completed in about one minute.

One useful feature of this software is a spyware scan that searches the computer for spyware and adware, using periodically updated signature files. Any such malware that is found can be selectively deleted by the software. For users concerned with privacy, the software can also erase all history files on the hard drive.

The registry is a complex database containing information on all of the software and hardware installed in the computer. Often the registry becomes bloated with obsolete information, and corrupted data, which can create a serious performance drag on the computer. Good PC hygiene dictates that the registry should be periodically scanned for errors and cleaned, and this software does an excellent job of this. One nice feature is the ability to recover any changes made with an integral restore feature. As a demonstration of its capabilities, as a test, I purposely ran other registry cleaning and repair utilities prior to running this one. As an extra precaution, I used my Windows system restore feature to back up my critical files prior to the test. I ran three of the other registry repair utilities, and dozens of registry defects were identified and repaired; I then ran Advanced WindowsCare Personal Edition, and hundreds of additional registry errors were found and repaired, that the other programs missed. There was no need to restore my files, because the system ran very well after the serial repair. This software is capable by itself to repair the registry, and the other registry repair utilities are no longer needed; this software did it all.

Our hard drives become cluttered with a variety of junk files, such as obsolete cache and temporary files. These useless files may waste countless megabytes on our drives, and slow down the ability of the hard drive to find data. If useless data is deleted from the hard drives, computer performance can be enhanced. Advanced WindowsCare Personal Edition contains a very efficient junk file removing utility. As a matter of personal choice, I prefer to look over the list of files found and decide which to delete, but it is fairly safe to delete what the software finds. As a matter of practice, after useless files are deleted, it would be a good idea to run Windows integral defragmentation utility, or a third party disk defragmentation utility, to further improve hard drive performance.

Another feature built into the software gauges Windows and internet performance, and offers options to improve the speed of the system. This helps give us the performance that we paid for when we originally purchased our systems, and helps to maximize our internet throughput. As our computers age, we are often plagued with slow startup and shutdown problems. This occurs because as we install software on our computers, many of the programs place items in the system startup by default, which forces the software to load when the computer is booted; more items in the startup means slower and longer boot times. Advanced WindowsCare Personal Edition contains a powerful but simple startup manager which displays the contents of our startup, and allows for the easy management and control of what loads when we boot. Fewer items loaded at boot means that our computer comes up faster, and runs faster because there is less demand on system resources. Because there are fewer items running, shut downs are also faster.

I have used this software for about a month and found it very useful and reliable, and can recommend it to all PC users with Windows 2000, XP, or Vista.

One of the most frequent questions asked on my weekly radio show on KLVI is how to improve computer performance and speed. Advanced WindowsCare Personal Edition is a valuable free tool that does much to improve performance, clean up the registry and startup, delete useless files, and otherwise provide benefits to the user.

Click here to return to top



==================================================================