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Center
Reviews
Take
a look at "Smart PC" Awards
PC Weekly Magazine, Hong
Kong (June 2005)
Download.com editor's review (CNET, August 2005)
On a number of fronts, Smart PC makes a clever and classy
choice for keeping your computer unencumbered by digital detritus.
The first thing you notice when you fire the program up is
its ultramodern, elegant design, which really deviates from
the standard gray-box formula we see so often. Smart PC features
a Registry cleaner, an uninstaller, a tool for removing invalid
shortcuts, and a utility that manages what programs launch
on system start. Other cleaning implements include those that
get rid of junk files (like BAKs and TMPs), remove duplicate
files, and cover your surfing tracks from Internet Explorer.
You can schedule Smart PC to run when you like, and the Quick
Schemes feature offers three levels of user-customizable automatic
cleaning sessions. The demo disables some of the Registry
cleaner's removal powers, but that's not a big deal considering
how useful its other tools are. Anyone looking to keep their
machine bloat-free will benefit from this good-looking, powerful
application.
Smart PC review by David A. Kerr-Burke, Coastal Area
Users Group (November 2005)
Halloween is just a few days away as I write this review,
so what better
topic than one that scares us all, keeping our computer up
and running and
more importantly keeping our data safe. Does it really matter
if it is a
draft letter to a relative, a photo of the historic 127 year
South Texas
snow, or the password to your online checking, I am sure you
do not want to
lose any of them.
So what is a person to do to make sure there are no goblins,
evil spirits of
spooky things or people on their computer. It has become a
game of one
upmanship, or leap frog if you prefer to stay ahead of the
bad guys.
One of the products that recently got my attention was SMART
PC v3.2 for
years I used a program called PCTools way back in the days
of DOS version 1
through 6.22 so I have always known that I needed a utility
to clean up or
do housekeeping on my system. SMART PC is such a tool, it
works on all
flavors of Windows 95 through XP and it covers the most important
housekeeping task that every computer user who wishes to keep
their data
safe, secure and whole should be doing on a regular basis,
just like
changing the oil in your car, and making sure you lock the
doors when you
park keep you car running smoothly, you need to do likewise
for your pc.
SMART PC will Fix up your PC!, it will get rid of those pesky
registry
entries that should have been removed when you uninstalled
software, or
those temporary entries that should have cleaned themselves
up after you
installed a program or worse those entries spy ware, Trojans,
and key
loggers make to steal you important info.
SMART PC ill Clean up your PC! This is the equivalent of
an oil change and
tune up, it just needs to be done and has always needed to
be done to
maintain a well running system.
SMART PC will Optimize your PC! Spy ware, and even PC Virus
will run
programs at startup, but what about that old print driver
that is trying to
load up a program for a printer you replaced two years ago,
did you know
that your system will try to load that for several minutes
before giving up
and then booting up, worse yet your system will never tell
you this is why
it is taking so long to get to the start screen. How many
times have I
heard, it used to run so much quicker when I first bought
it. This is
exactly why it is running so slow now, your system does not
know you have a
new camera or printer (just two of hundreds of possibilities)
so it keeps
trying till you tell it not to.
SMART PC will Protect against Identity Theft! Cookies can
be both a blessing
and a curse, and several sites such as online checking will
not work unless
you accept them so turning them off is not the answer, but
with a tool like
SMART PC you can clean up all those temporary internet files,
cookies and
history tracks that will make things run better, and more
importantly safer.
I downloaded the free version from http://www.smartpctools.com/smartpc/
just
click on the button on the bottom of the page. It installed
effortlessly, I
noticed some of the features are disabled but most work and
it will give you
an idea of how it works before you spend the $29.95 for the
full version.
For my peace of mind and the time it saves me it is well worth
the $29.95
Running SMART PC is also easy, just double click on the icon
to run it, and
you will notice three buttons on the right and three on the
left. Click on
FIX for instance and a menu in the middle of the screen displays
the choices
of FIX Registry Problems or FIX Invalid Shortcuts, click either
one and a
new menu opens with one of the options as START click on that
and SMART PC
will find all those orphaned shortcuts from programs you have
removed or
updated and repair or remove them. If that is too many clicks
for you them
on the left side is Quick Schemes click on Full and Start
and it will do
everything. There is a full log report and an UNDO feature.
One word of CAUTION, always back up those items you do not
wish to lose, I
do not care how well software works, things go bad. I had
a light bulb in a
closet that I had not replaced in the 22 years since I bought
my home, one
day I turned it on and flash it burnt out... the morale BACKUP!
I like SMART PC, they have a Professional version for $49.95
I think I will
take a look at that next.
David A. Kerr-Burke
David, served as president for Coastal Area Users Group www.caug.org
for
over a decade, he owns and operates Corpus Christi Advanced
Technologies
www.ccatech.com since 1987 they have been the computer solutions
of choice
for Small business and home users in the Coastal Bend. David
founded
"Computer Corner" on KIII-TV ABC affiliate and is
a lead instructor for
Delmar College Senior Computer Education. He built his first
computer in
1976 (yes there was life before Microsoft and IBM). David
welcomes questions
and comments at caug@ccatech.com
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