Fix-It Utilities 11 Professional is a comprehensive tool for fixing PC problems, tuning up your system, protecting you from malware and viruses, and plenty more. Name a system fix-up tool and Fix-It Utilities 11 Professional most likely has it, from repairing your Registry to doing hardware diagnostics, to checking your hard disk for errors, to cleaning out programs that don't need to run at start up, to shredding files that you want deleted permanently. And that's just a start.

You can reach all the tools from Fix-it Utilities Pro's single, overarching interface, which features a number of different major categories of modules, such as for diagnosing problems, fixing and maintaining your system, optimizing your system, and so on. Each of those major categories then includes individual modules. The Optimize category, for example, includes nine different modules, such as for improving your boot performance, defragmenting your Registry, defragmenting your hard disk, and other performance-improving functions.

In fact, there are so many tools in Fix-It Utilities, you'd have to make a point--maybe even a hobby--of using them all. And some of the tools it offers are somewhat controversial, because they perform tasks that not everyone believes will actually speed up your system. For instance, its memory optimizer which changes the size of your system's paging file. Some people believe that Windows does a good job of that on its own, and that interfering with the way that Windows handles it doesn't help at all.

Another potential problem is that in some modules, you don't get a chance to review and customize the changes the program makes--Fix-It just does it on its own, without giving you a chance to make changes. In the Registry fixing tool, for example, it doesn't first show you what potential Registry problems you have before fixing them. And it appears that Fix-It Utilities Pro overestimates the number of Registry problems you may have. On my system it reported 448 Registry errors, even though several other tools reported only a handful. One more issue is that when you first run the program and have it scan for errors, it can take up to a half hour before it finishes its work.

Still, all these are relatively minor quibbles. Fix-It Utilities Professional 11 is a very useful all-in-one suite of tools that will help keep your PC running in tip-top shape. It's comparable to other similar programs, such as System Mechanic.

--Preston Gralla