SysCheckUp

Editor's Review:

Tuning up your system is a must on regular basis, everyone knows that. Now if you are really good with computers you wont need external tools to do this job for you, but most of people is not that familiar with their operating system. This is where tools like SysCheckUp step up. First of all even if you are familiar with your windows registry well enough to perform tis maintenance by yourself this approach is not really productive, since you would have to go through a lot of keys every time. Now if you are familiar with programming you could write a script or a program to automate this process. Why did we say this? To prove that tools like SysCheckUp are used by everyone, not just beginners.

Now the program is divided in three parts, excluding help and options, which all contain tools related to specific tasks. There we have a "Registry" part with four tools related to repairing different registry issues, "Files/Folders" part to help us with maintaining our hard disks healthy and "Repair" part with only one tool that is supposed to find all problems with our computer and fix them, meaning it scans all crucial areas of OS to detect possible malfunctions like audio problems, missing drives and such. Apart from those three parts the program has options tab with not that much options, and a help tab without any offline help.

Now let's start with "Registry" part of the program. First tool here is Registry Cleaner. It scans registry for errors and unnecessary data and removes it. There are three modes of scan: normal, extreme and deep scan mode. We did normal scan and it took about 3 minutes to complete. This is not bad since registry is not a small part of Windows. Now the results are nicely displayed, but we would also like to see the actual problem description next to registry entry tagged as problematic. Most of other registry cleaners have this option and it really helps novices to decide whether to let it delete that particular entry or not. Other than that we are really satisfied with SysCheckUps performance on this field.

Next part of "Registry" area is "Registry Compactor" which is supposed to optimize windows registry for faster access, we would say something like defragmentation is at work here. Now it is pretty plain, you click Analyze it analyzes your registry and tells you how faster can it be if compacted in percents and asks you whether you wish it to do this or no. Note that if you agree to let the program compact your registry you must close all applications and when process is finished windows must be restarted. When you click Analyze button a message box pops up telling you that this process can take a few minutes and might freeze the program on occasion. Well while we were scanning it did freeze the program for a while but the entire scan lasted less than a half of a minute so this is really a plus to the developers. Since our registry was compacted for 2,03% we didn't see any improvements, but we will trust developers on this one.

Next on our agenda is "Registry Backup/Restore" option. This is really self-explanatory it backs up or restores your registry from the backup that you made earlier. The backup is really fast, and it is done in less than 5 seconds. You can have multiple backups, the program will store them all for you with the dates when they were done, so you can restore the one you need.

The last part of "Registry" area is "Startup Manager". Now we must mention that almost all of programs similar to SysCheckUp have a startup manager that is either same as Microsoft's msconfig or even worse. This is not the case with this program. It reads all the startup entries form registry meaning you will have quite a list there. It does take some time to load all of the items but that is normal since it reads absolutely everything that loads on startup. This includes even drivers and windows services. Lets just say that this is the most comprehensive startup tool that we have ever seen and it goes without saying that it is not meant for novices to mess around with.

Now a little about "Files/Folders" section of the program. First stop is "Disk Cleaner", which is used to detect unnecessary files from specific partition and remove them. The speed of this task solely depends on the size of partition and number of files on it, so we can't comment on its speed. However when we scanned a 30Gb partition with around 29GB of used space, scan lasted for about 30 minutes which is pretty slow. Now we are not really sure how does this program decide which files are unnecessary and which not but most of them are from Temp and Windows folders which is not entirely safe to clean if you aren’t sure.

Next one is "Broken Shortcut Remover" which is, again , pretty self-explanatory. There is really not much to say about this one, it scans selected hard drive for shortcuts that lead to nowhere and removes them. This is much faster operation than previous one and it checks all shortcuts, including the ones in Windowses "Recent" folder.

Last one in "Files/Folders" section of this program is "Empty Folder Remover" which is pretty much the same as "Broken Shortcut Remover" only it searches for empty folders and removes them. Now this is not as safe as removing shortcuts since the specific folders may be used for storing temporary files from some applications that are not running at the moment, but then again they could be just that, an empty folder. Since Empty folders don’t really use up any space this scan would be purely for esthetics of your partition. The scan is pretty fast, same as with shortcuts.

And the last section of SysCheckUp is "Repair" which has only one option and that's "Repair Tool". When we scanned our system for potential errors it reported only two: Auto run for CD/DVDs is not activated (which we intentionally deactivated) and One or more programs don’t function properly. Now that’s about all the information you get from this tool. When you select the problem you want to fix it tells you that once started this process cannot be stopped. We would suggest developers to put a bit more information about nature of the problem and what steps will be taken in order to fix it, since we don’t really like letting a program blindly dig through our registry/settings.

Now for the options, it is divided in several categories which are: "General", "Registry Cleaner", "Disk Cleaner", "Startup Manager" and "Ignore Lists". In General tab you can only change priority of the process which is pretty poor choice from our point of view. Process priority can be easily changed from task manager so it's really not needed here. Some options like skin change would be nice to see or the way the program alerts you when the scan is finished. In "Registry Cleaner" only option is to chose the way of backing up the registry from three choices, from which all do the same thing just in a slightly different way. "Disk Cleaner" category is actually the only useful one (apart from "Ignore Lists"). Here you can choose which file extensions are considered unnecessary and whether you want the program to send files to recycle bin or delete them immediately. In "Startup Manager" you have two choices: whether you wish program to display Microsoft startup items or not and whether it should display registylocation column or not. Not necessary but not bad to have. And finally "Ignore Lists" consists of, well ignore lists that you set for all of the tools in this program.

The main window of SysCheckUp is done in a really great manner. Graphics and icons look really professional and everything is at its place. Sadly this cant be said for the rest of the program. Every tool looks pretty much the same with some minor adjustments to complement its nature. This could have been done much better if it was modeled by main window. All tools lack graphics and look pretty basic.

All in all pretty good tool with fully functional trial period. We can recommend it but definitely not to absolute beginners since it can do some damage to system if not used properly.

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