Avanquest Fix-It Utilities 8 Professional review

Fix-It Utilities 8 Professional is a suite of tools for maintaining your PC or diagnosing and curing problems.

The clean, easily accessible interface divides the tools into those used for system protection and those dedicated to system maintenance. Protection focuses on virus and spyware detection, with background and user-initiated virus scanners and spyware-detection utilities that can perform Quick, Thorough and Registry scans.

Tools in the maintenance section are divided into Diagnose, Fix & Maintain, Optimize, Cleanup and Recovery. Many of these, such as StartupCommander, RegistryEditor and the included disk defragmenter, are similar to utilities available in Windows. Others, such as ClockSync (which keeps a system clock's time accurate) are of minimal use. The Registry tools, however, make it easy to fix, clean and defragment the Registry. This can often lead to improved performance, particularly if you have installed and uninstalled a lot of applications. The disk cleaner makes it easy to get rid of unnecessary files. However, you should check exactly what will be removed, as the scope of the initial search is very wide.

You can set recovery points that allow you to return your computer to a previous configuration. These are not as comprehensive as dedicated backup tools, though. To guard against serious system malfunction and data loss, we'd recommend a separate backup utility.

A selection of one-click fixes are provided, each with a friendly, non-technical name. These run pre-configured routines drawn from the tool set, enabling you to keep your system in a healthy condition even if you have little technical knowledge.

Fix-It Utilities 8 Professional is a useful suite of tools for the general maintenance of your computer, and is particularly handy for the novice user. While some of the components are similar to existing Windows utilities, there are just enough extras to justify the price.