IObit Advanced SystemCare Review

IObit Advanced Systemcare Ultimate Features

Below you'll find everything the utility has to offer.

System Scan

Before Advanced System Care Ultimate can work its magic it all starts with a system scan so it can get an overview of what needs to be tuned. You can let the program go the whole hog by itself or pick and choose exactly what it analyzes. If at this stage you’re not too sure, the good news is nothing physically will be altered to your system until you give the okay after the scan is complete.

The scan is part of the Advanced SystemCare Free version, but you won’t get access to many of the fixes it suggests unless you pay, so it’s not much of a performance enhancer for your PC unless you go premium.

Under Manual Mode, you can hover over or click through each option to see more about what it does. We were, for example, skeptical of the idea of a ‘registry defrag’ and whether such a thing can be possible. The Windows registry does not store data itself and thus a regular defrag would do all of the work. Anyway, we gave it a shot, and at best nothing negative happened, at worst it’s probably a bit of a gimmick. 

Our IObit Advanced SystemCare review looks at the full list of options available:

Privacy Sweep: Removes your browser and Windows history (i.e. recently accessed files etc). A standard but useful option to keep your browsers lightweight.

Junk File Clean: Deletes junk left behind by old uninstalled programs and Windows processes. This will free up the majority of the space and is an invaluable part of the Advanced System Care Free and the Ultimate version.

Shortcut Fix: Finds shortcuts to programs and files on your desktop and elsewhere that no longer exist and gets rid of them – perfect if you try a lot of programs and uninstall them.

Registry Clean: Deletes the Windows registry keys for uninstalled programs, redundant shortcuts, and virus remnants so the registry remains efficient. Whether this really affects speed is debatable but why keep around redundant data? It adds to your overall PC maintenance.

System Optimization: A Pro feature that analyzes how you use your PC and focusses more resources on those tasks, including ‘Daily User’, ‘Office Work’, and ‘Server’. Our Advanced SystemCare review found this mostly involves RAM prioritization and is easily turned off.

Internet Boost: A Pro feature that stabilizes your network and accelerates internet speed in certain situations by prioritizing bandwidth and choosing the best channel for your area. For the tech experts, it also adjusts data packet transmission to improve speed by optimizing TCP/IP parameters. 

Registry Defrag: Optimizes the registry for better performance, but exactly how is a mystery beyond cleaning old keys.

Disk Defrag: Optimizes your hard drives so that regularly used files/data/programs can be accessed faster. This mirrors standard disk defragging you can do in Windows with some added prioritization of files. 

Antivirus Protection: Protects your system from viruses and malware with its own program or check that your own software is installed and working. Our IObit Advanced SystemCare review will take a closer look at their malware tool below.

Firewall: Checks that your Windows Firewall is protecting you from outside threats and offers added tools for tougher security.

Hardware Health: Detects and updates hardware drivers to prevent crashes and poor performance as operating systems and software advances.

Software Health: Detects and updates outdated software to prevent security risks and to ensure you’ve got the latest features.

Spyware Removal: Detects and removes viruses and programs that spy on your computer/browser usage and data. This is helpful because not all antivirus programs focus on spyware. 

Security Reinforce: Scans the system for weaknesses that hackers and viruses could exploit. Disables features Windows uses that could breach your privacy. IObit Advanced SystemCare Ultimate does this process ‘deeper’ than the free Advanced SystemCare and ensures the most Windows 10 optimization.

Vulnerability Fix: Finds vulnerabilities in your current Window’s installation; disable, enable, or repair these elements.

Disk Check: Analyzes the performance of your hard drives, if they’re beginning to fail or contain errors, and corrects them if possible. We found and fixed one error with an old external USB hard drive but there wasn’t much detail about what that problem was or how it was fixed.

Results

For our Advanced SystemCare Ultimate review, we went for a full scan of everything to test the software. We haven’t run such a program in at least a year, so we found a lot of stuff. Here are some key observations from the results:

• There really are a lot of features and useful results; more than PC Mechanic and similar programs.
• Even the free computer performance enhancer can inspect everything it detects and let you choose whether you want it cleaned, deleted, fixed, or enabled/disabled. This is a major plus - there’s nothing worse than overzealous software that thinks it knows best but ends up changing things you weren’t expecting.
• It will clean your browser history, including saved/typed URLs, visited sites, download history, saved sessions, cookies, and cache; as well as things like recent documents accessed in Windows. As other computer cleaner reviews might not warn you, while this will free up some space and add a small level of privacy, sometimes having your most visited URLs pop up when you type them or a page load quicker from cache can be quite useful. It’s good that you can decide whether to proceed with cleaning or not. This feature is best suited for office-based or shared PCs.
• System optimizations and internet improvements can be confusing and are not always explained adequately. For example, we don’t know whether optimizing ‘CertPropSvc’ will optimize Windows 10 performance and must have blind faith it won’t cause any problems. So far, so good.
• You know how whenever you have a technical problem you’re asked: ‘Have you updated your drivers?’ Well, now you can say yes! Because this tool is really helpful at listing outdated drivers and we had 16 of them. It won’t automatically do this either because sometimes there are reasons to stay using old drivers, but this feature was really helpful for our computer tune-up.
• Software update detection, however, seems patchy. Our IObit Advanced SystemCare review found it catches some. For us, it was VLC Player and 7-Zip. However, we know other programs from our Adobe suite need updating and they weren’t picked up by the scan. At the least, it gives you a nudge to check whether you should be updating those programs you use sporadically. 
• ‘System Weaknesses’ was very helpful and explained in good detail each potential problem. For example, we had no idea Microsoft was collecting data about how we type words or that this could be turned off. While we don’t think the corporation is using this for nefarious reasons we always err on the side of privacy and happily disabled it. This isn’t what makes this the best PC optimization software, but it certainly adds to the mix.
• If you already have antivirus software or firewalls turned on, it will detect this and give you a clean bill of health. Turning these off and doubling up using their own versions may offer added protection. This is most useful for users who still have old versions of Windows that have poorer native antivirus capabilities and higher security risks.
• That registry defrag tool found no items that needed to be fixed. Perhaps our skepticism was vindicated or maybe Windows 10 is just better at maintaining the registry than older versions.
• Even as standard it will not fix everything automatically; drivers and some system weaknesses are left for you to decide whether to proceed even if you set the software to auto. In fact, it upsells a program called ‘Driver Booster’, which was a bit disappointing from a piece of premium software. Overall, it’s good that the user is the one to make decisions though.
• On the flipside, absolute beginners can choose to let the software do most of the thinking for them and we don’t believe this will cause any major issues. Optimization features are easily turned off and cleaning tools do not delete personal files, so not much can go wrong. 

Overall, we were able to clean up a nice 2.5GBs of useless data with no negative consequences after several reboots and general use. As a cleaner, IObit Advanced SystemCare Ultimate does what’s needed and optimization settings were noticeably able to speed up PC performance.

Speed Up

This is our tuneup utility review; the section of the software that aims to speed up your PC generally and under certain circumstances. Overall, it is a good PC optimizer. Let’s take a closer look at the available features and what they do:

Turbo Boost

Allows you to turn off unnecessary processes in the background to release RAM. It can be set to Work, Gaming, and Economy mode or left on the basic setting. This is much more detailed than the regular system optimizer option on the Care page.

It should be noted that it doesn’t close programs, it just stops certain programs and background processes from continually using RAM while you’re focused on specific things, making it a good PC performance enhancer.

For example, we turned off Skype and Xbox services. Neither of these programs was even running but for whatever reason had processes taking up resources.

We found this tool particularly beneficial in gaming mode where we were able to achieve some extra frames on our machine that sits somewhere between mid and high-end. A few extra frames on those shooters are much appreciated. The other modes were negligible for our activities and probably only noticeable on lower-end PCs with little RAM, to begin with. It definitely works though because you can see the metrics both in the program itself and from the Windows task manager by looking at RAM and CPU usage.

Startup Optimizer

Ever found yourself boot up your PC only to begin frantically closing programs you don’t currently care about in the tray? Startup Optimizer solves this perfectly. It gives you full control over which programs should open on startup and which should shut up until you choose to open them. Personally, we told EpicGames and Discord to get out of there – we’ll let you know when we want to start playing, chatting, or the dreaded updating. 

A major plus is that this tool is part of the free PC performance enhancer, so there’s no need to pay to manage your startup programs.

Hardware Accelerator

This is the extra program used to update drivers detected by the Care scan. It worked well and we discovered an aging Logitech webcam needed an update. So, we did it with ease. 

Real-Time TuneUp

This is a really useful and non-intrusive widget that tells you exactly how much RAM and CPU you are currently using and optimizing as you go. You can click a small button to the left to optimize RAM more intently or a button to the right to open the full program for further use. Any other tuneup utilities review shows that a lot of these programs can be much more intrusive, so we give ASC a thumbs up here.

App and Toolbar Cleaner

This is an add-on program but useful, nonetheless. It tells you which programs (apps) and browser plug-ins/extensions you haven’t used in at least 3 months, suggesting you never really needed them in the first place. It can uninstall them and is a bit more thorough than the native Windows Add/Remove feature. We found it particularly good at reminding us we had a bunch of Chrome extensions that we’d never even used and were probably hogging some kind of resource.

Smart RAM 3.0

This Advanced SystemCare performance monitor for Ultimate users monitors your memory usage even further. It helps the physical memory by recycling memory blocks that you don’t use. This means it detects programs that may be hogging memory in the background, like Chrome, and utilizes it elsewhere if you haven’t switched over to Chrome in a while. Again, this feature is more useful for PCs that have particularly low RAM, to begin with, but everyone will notice the difference to a degree. 

Program Deactivator

This feature allows you to temporarily deactivate a program and all its processes (including on startup) to free up resources. You can choose which elements you deactivate so you don’t have to nuke the entire program.

Protect

System Protection

Away from cleaning and speed, we look toward security. As noted, if you already have firewall and antivirus software (including those native to Windows 10) the program will give you a thumbs up. If not, you can use its own ‘Malware Fighter 8’ addon. We turned off Windows antivirus and gave Malware Fighter a try.

After updating its database, you go through a Smart or Full Scan. Our Smart Scan didn’t find anything. Our full scan did pick up on a cheat Trainer for a game that at least had the potential to do something untoward. So, Malware Fighter gets a thumbs up for that, though we wouldn’t rely on it solely - other dedicated anti-virus programs are obviously better.  

Browser Protection

Its browser protection covers all browsers installed on your system and includes: 

• Email protection, with support for Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo, with the ability to auto-detect threats beyond your email’s regular capabilities and the use of an optional whitelist so suspicious emails you DO want, get through. 
• Ads Removal, which blocks some but not all ads on websites. Think of it as a watered-down version of Ad-blocker.
• Surfing Protection, keeping you away from unsecured or dangerous websites, and ‘cryptocurrency mining’ which is when sites hijack your CPU power to mine digital currencies.
• Anti-tracking amounts to automatically clearing your internet history, cache, and cookies for every site you visit all the time. The whitelist is useful for those trusted sites you log in to regularly. However, would Chrome’s incognito mode make this redundant?
• Homepage Advisor, tells you if your homepage has been changed or something is trying to change it to an ad-heavy, dangerous, or spoof page. This feature is a little old-school and you’d expect other security features to pick up on this beforehand but it doesn’t hurt to include it.

Sensitive Data Protection

This unique feature allows you to designate protected files, programs, contacts, browsing history, and other data and alert you when someone tries to access them. Think of this as a password protecting your data without the password. It’s certainly useful if all other protection fails.  

Software Updater

This is where you can update the software that was detected as outdated during the system scan. Typically, the programs will be auto-downloaded during the scan, but it is here whether you choose to actually install those updates.

Action Center

You’d be wrong if you thought this is where a trove of detected threats is kept. This is actually just a giant advert for IObit’s other premium software packages. It’s part of its general theme of trying to upsell things even if you’ve bought the Ultimate edition of Advanced SystemCare 

IObit Advanced Systemcare Review: Other Features

There are numerous other tools and features discovered in our IObit Advanced SystemCare review that either come native with the program or as free add-ons. Perhaps the best of these is FaceID.

FaceID

Uses your Webcam and facial recognition technology to detect that it is indeed you trying to access your laptop/computer or an intruder.

MyWin10

Helps identify and fix common problems with your OS, speeding up Windows 10.

System Information

A more detailed overview of all of your system’s info, specs, and hardware.

Auto Shutdown

Shuts down your PC at a scheduled time regardless of any other restart settings.

Portable Version

Creates a portable version of the program you can put on a USB drive to use on another system. Pro license allows up to 3 simultaneous installations.

Context Menu Manager

Helps you more easily customize the menus within Windows.

Disk Doctor

Detects any problem with your hard drives, including external drives connected by USB.

Undelete

Takes over the Recycle Bin feature on Windows and helps you restore deleted files that should have been gone forever.

Default Program

Helps you more easily manage your default programs for certain functions, such as browsers, which program is for opening images, etc.

Disk Cleaner

Looks for unnecessary files on your hard drive beyond the typical junk files and allows you to easily delete them.

File Shredder

Ensures files you delete are gone for good, much like a real-life shredder destroys sensitive documents.

Empty Folder Scanner

Deeply scans your PC for folders that are empty so they can be removed if you wish. Many software uninstallers still leave their folder behind.

Cloned File Scanner

Searches for duplicate files so you can delete them and free up space.

Large File Finder

Easily find particularly large files, no matter how deep or hidden they are in the system, and lets you delete them if safe to do so. This is particularly useful for those that edit video or audio and have old projects taking up space. While Windows can do this, it’s one of those tasks that take forever to properly figure out.

Process Manager

An alternative to Windows Task Manager with real-time performance measures and the ability to kill processes.

Advanced SystemCare Review: Performance

Unlike other Advanced System Care reviews, we went through every feature, and overall, IObit Advanced Systemcare Ultimate performs well. Despite having an endless amount of tools, it never feels like it bogs down the system. Whether you’ll be using all of those features is another matter.

Take the time to set things up, download any of the add-ons you want, and perform your first scan. You should be able to proceed smoothly without any problems as it does its thing from the background.

The program itself has a nice clean modern interface that separates its core functions with tabs down the left-hand side. Once you get further inside, each tool or feature has at least a mouse-hover explanation about what it does. Some let you click through for further info and options. 

Even if you still aren’t sure you should proceed with one of its tools, our Advanced System Care Ultimate review found it’s easy to turn settings back off or manually choose to fix things it has found. 

Indeed, it has one of the best computer cleaner tools out there. Even if you think you’ve stayed on top of deleting unwanted files and uninstalling software, you’ll still end up with hundreds of megabytes if not gigabytes of data that can be removed safely. That’s without mentioning large files left on your drive from editing projects that you’ll never use again. 

As with any internet or system browsing history cleaning, just be sure you aren’t over-reliant on ‘recent files’ or ‘saved URLs’ as deleting this data won’t save much space but could reduce your productivity. The security benefit of cleaning this kind of data is also negligible in our opinion, as long as you are using other security features. The rest, along with internet caches, junk files from old installations, and registry entries are fair game and can free up a lot of space and will improve performance, especially on older machines. 

Exactly what’s going on under the hood isn’t always clear. What we do know is that with the startup optimizer configured to block as many programs as feasible and the RAM optimization tools turned on, we had our system up and running much quicker than before. Our game launchers, restoring Chrome sessions, and opening Premiere Pro all seemed to work much quicker. Meanwhile, flicking through an insane number of tabs all day in Chrome never reached its usual snagging point where you need to kill the process and restore.

This is most likely down to the real-time optimization which is designed to help keep the junk from piling up in the first place and the RAM from eventually leaking somewhere. Even after several reboots we were happy that Advanced System Care Ultimate really was doing good. For just $29.99, it is definitely worth it. So, if you’re wondering does Advanced SystemCare work - it indeed does.

All of its other little tools and features offer their usefulness and add to its contention for the best PC optimizer.

Pricing

Here's what you need to know about IObit Advanced SystemCare's pricing:

• $29.99/year, 3 Licenses 
• FREE Windows Tweaks Guide eBook
• 60-day money-back guarantee
• Advanced SystemCare Free for basic cleaning

Pricing is as straightforward as it gets. $29.99 gets you the full program for a year with three PC licenses, meaning you can run it on three machines at once. IObit Advanced Systemcare free has no time limit, but it’s not so feature-rich, compared to the Ultimate version. 

Iobit Advanced SystemCare vs CCleaner

A lot of Advanced Systemcare reviews don’t do comparisons, so we looked at Advanced System Care and CCleaner. We found them similar in their junk cleaning abilities and system startup optimization. However, ASC has by far the most features and is able to optimize your system in ways that CCleaner cannot.

For example, CCleaner does not handle malware or spyware, cannot optimize your internet connection, doesn’t do anything about RAM, and has no internet privacy features. That’s without mentioning the variety of free add-on tools that work alongside the core program.

Pricewise, Advanced SystemCare also offers more bang for your buck. At $19.95 CCleaner is charging virtually the same but for much less functionality. They also have a more expensive $34.95 Pro Plus edition that simply adds a system information/specs tool and a file recovery tool. Advanced SystemCare Ultimate has similar features within its straight $19.99 price tag. 

You can get an Advanced SystemCare Free version, as you can with CCleaner, but both have their limitations over the paid versions.

While their interfaces are both user-friendly and quite similar, and they remain light and will not hog your RAM or CPU themselves, IOBit has created a much more complete package that optimizes your entire computer experience. CCleaner is a competent cleaner, but IObit will fine-tune your entire PC at better value for money.

Advanced SystemCare Review: Verdict

There’s much to like following our IObit Advanced SystemCare review. The software is modern-looking and intuitive and provides superior junk file cleaning at the click of a mouse. Its other features are abundant, and while they’re full of promises, there’s enough there to actually make it worth your while. Especially with the Advanced SystemCare latest version 14.

We experienced a marked performance improvement after scanning our system and switching on the majority of the optimization settings. And, while we’d need to encounter threats to properly test its security features we did find that it could detect a questionable PC game cheat trainer. It asked us if we wanted to delete it – a file Windows itself had overlooked for weeks.

Our only qualm is that IOBit does not house all of its tools under one program. Still, they’re free and accessible to license holders. Furthermore, there’s a little too much upselling of other premium products that we feel should be left only on the free version. A lot of Advanced SystemCare Ultimate reviews tend to agree.

If you can get past that though, IObit Advanced SystemCare Ultimate is a powerful piece of software that does make a real difference. It’s well worth $19.99.

If you are looking for an Advanced SystemCare Free review, simply focus on our cleaning aspect of the review above to get a good idea of how the free version works.