Avanquest Fix-It Utilities 12.0
Fix-It Utilities is a venerable suite of
maintenance tools for Windows. Over the years it's grown more sophisticated at
pre empting the problems that are most likely to slow down a Windows PC. Many of
its functions offer one click fixes.
During the installation procedure, Fix-It
Utilities looks for existing antivirus programs and asks whether you want to
continue using them or use its own antivirus engine, licensed from Sunbelt
Software.
Utilities are grouped under three main
headings: Optimise, Security and Fix, and Maintain. Optimize offers a Registry
Fixer, Memory Optimiser and a fast Disk Defrag, among others. It’s designed to
make your PC start up and run faster. Security controls how the antimalware
programs work, offering various scan types and letting you configure Allowed
and Blocked lists. Fix and Maintain handles file and Registry cleaning, with
tools for System Recovery, File Restore and a Scheduler.
Avanquest cites four new or improved features
in version 12.0. there’s a PC Analyser, which lets you tailor what runs on your
PC, a four-fold increase in the speed of Registry repair, a Program Optimiser,
which accelerates application launch times and responsiveness, and a 35 percent
speed increase in antivirus scanning.
Fix It Utilities took an hour to scan the
same 50GB bundle of files we use to test regular internet security suites. This
is none too quick, and Fix-It Utilities doesn’t log the number of files it’s
scanned. We were therefore unable to calculate the scan rate.
A One-Click Fix button lets you run all the
necessary Utilities on your computer without manually ploughing through them.
This took around an hour on our test PC, but it found a lot of redundant files,
processes and Registry entries. The system then started up and ran noticeably
quicker.
At one point a message popped up stating
that not all the temporary files could be deleted and our attention was
required. That’s fine, except that it didn’t say which files couldn’t be deleted,
so we couldn’t take matters into our own hands.
Running the Temporary Files Cleaner
separately appeared to delete them all, but the message popped up again next
time we ran a One-Click Fix.
Verdict
To a large extent, Fix-It Utilities 12.0
handles all the key housekeeping tasks needed to keep your PC running well. We
experienced some problems, but they may be unique to out test PC.
