System Mechanic 7 Professional is a lot like a slice of warm apple pie. It tastes pretty good all on its own, but without a scoop of vanilla ice cream to keep it company, the experience just isn’t the same.

You should pretty much know what you’re getting with System Mechanic by now. The latest version of the program again crams a ton of useful Windows utilities under a single umbrella, and, seemingly, no stone is left unturned—with it you can do everything from recovering memory, to nuking unnecessary files off your drive, to compacting and backing up your registry.

Power users will undoubtedly appreciate the program’s geekier functions. Although it takes a while, System Mechanic’s built-in ability to transplant an installed program to a new location in your system works like a charm. And the applications that come bundled alongside System Mechanic, such as DriveScrubber 3 and Search and Recover 4, are a great bonus.

But System Mechanic lacks that extra oomph—the ice cream. While the program’s lack of printed documentation has been “fixed” by the addition of a handy online help system, it would nevertheless be nice to have something tangible in the box. Even a brief “this is how you get started, noob” instructional card would go a long way.

System Mechanic provides users with a ton of information about the overall problems their computers have, but it doesn’t provide enough detail about what specifically is wrong and what specifically is being done to fix the problem. For example, System Mechanic will tell you some junk files are on your PC, but not what they are or whether it is safe to delete them. It goes without saying: One program’s junk is another program’s critical file, and System Mechanic lacks selectivity.

Still, System Mechanic is a great solution for novices who want a one-stop tune-up solution and experts who want some additional tweaking power. It’s not perfect, but hey—even by itself apple pie is still good.

The main menu serves up a quick slice of your system’s status.

Iolo System Mechanic 7 Professional
www.iolo.com

PIE

Wonderfully automated, comes with a ton of additional utilities outside of System Mechanic itself, damned comprehensive.

NOT-PIE

Could offer more details as to what it's actually doing to your computer, and we miss manuals.