Others say...

"Product Not Ready for Market"
I bought a PNY Vid card that gave me a big discount on iolo sys mech pro 7. I tried to add it to 2 new computers, both Vista, both completely clean and the Firewall will not run.

I think the most telling feature about a product is when it's maker will not support it. The tech support at iolo is so bad it would be a comedy routine it not for the fact that it's wasting my time.

Iolo e-mail support is bizarre. In response to your request for help, they send you a link to their "knowledge base". I got the same answer 3 times. They didn't even read my request! The link is not even related to the flippin' problem!

This is like the line from Apocalypse Now ... The Horror, The Horror.

Buyer Beware.

"Autorun for some applications seems to shy away before almighty SM7 Pro."
I am a long time registered user of iolo's System Mechanics Pro product (i.e. 3, 4, 5, currently 6) and two days ago I decided to go with new version 7. As I have a quite good user experience of previous versions I did not run trial version and bought it right away and installed it without hesitation.
Well... In a blink of an eye, all these wonder years went to shatters. After installation of SM7 Pro I could not play previously installed games as well as installation of new applications requires almost an acrobatic skills as autorun for setup file seems to shy away before almighty SM7 Pro. Although clicking on setup.exe file on CD/DVD media will give it a kick for installation process to finally proceed.
Many options of SM7 take forever to finish the started process and occasionally freeze doing so.
At first my thoughts were that there might be a conflict between antivirus and firewall I run and SM7 Pro. I had disabled Zone Alarm Pro and BitDefender but all in vain. SM7 Pro lives on its own.
I gave iolo another chance and installed SM7 Pro on two other computers running Media Center as well as Server 2003 to see if the problem persist or is limited to my machine only (XP Home Edition). Unfortunately problem persists to occur on all three systems. However, SM6 Pro works seamlessly on these systems. No problems what so ever and does a great job too.
If you are looking for utility that does take care of slow downs, excessive clutter and a couple of more extra things like removing deleted file data consider previous version of System Mechanics which got all the bells and whistles and does not cause applications from running properly.
But if you are tech savvy and want something with the latest version number then look somewhere else. SM7 Pro will do you no good.


"absolute junk !!!!!!!!!!!"
the previous reviews pretty much say it all, but 1 more thing to add is technical support by e-mail, DOES NOT EXISTS ! do not buy, you are better off with the version 6 pro.

"What a piece of junk!"
I tried System Mechanic 5, and then 6 way back when. Both were ok but had their bugs. System Mechanic pro 7 is not only buggy but dangerous to your system! I get the blue screen of death now after running some fixes with System Mechanic pro 7. The worst thing to do to your computer is to let System Mechanic Pro 7 mess with it!

"do you like beta testing anitvirus and firewall software?"
well, that's what you will be doing if you buy this product!

I used SysMechPro6 all last year with no complaints, a good price for some decent system utilities with a good virus and firewall. but right now, this year's product is beta!

they were in partnership with Kaspersky (always rated high) to get their virus and firewall components, which was great, but this year they added their own proprietary software. short answer, its bad, really buggy.

I have not gotten it to work anywhere close to normal yet. the virus program won't even load its real-time protection becasue of an error message and like the other reviewer, you have to disable the program to send emails with an attachment.

they have had like 4 updates over the last month and I would say that it seems to be getting worse in some ways. they still haven't stopped my original problems and now the firewall is acting up.

also, the firewall is so intrusive, even under the low setting, that the filtering process when loading graphics pages is so slow with DSL that its more like the days of using dialup, wating for the page to load.

pass on this one for now. plus, remeber, before you buy, go to thier websight and download the trial version (full functioning) and if that works on your machine, good for you and maybe go for it. unfortunately, I just assumed that after using a good product all last year I was fine so automatically upgraded and now they won't return my money (without a fight) because they say I had a chance to give it a trial first so that's like a pre-return policy.