Being a guy who used to make a living from repairing computers, you might understand that I'm slightly cynical about the prospect of people repairing their own machines when things go wrong; if anything serious should happen then you're certainly best off calling a professional. In my experience, a little knowledge in the wrong hands can be deadly and often attempting to repair your Operating System yourself will end in tears!

That having been said, I do certainly see the need for applications that can provide an element of automated system repair and preventive maintenance and one such application I recently discovered called Advanced WindowsCare fits that bill nicely.

The version of the software that I will be reviewing today is the free personal edition; however there is also a $29.95 professional version. Compatible with Windows 2000, XP and Vista, both versions can be obtained from www.iobit.com, and with the personal edition weighing in at only 6mb it shouldn't take two minutes to download. Once installed the level of automation is quite scary; simply click the scan button and the application will look inside your computer and will categorise your problems in to the following areas:

Spyware - Provides details of any Spyware or Adware installed on your computer; whilst there are a million and one applications providing this facility, another one certainly won't hurt.

Security Defence - Locates sections of your computer that can be 'immunised' to avoid potential safety compromising software from being installed on your PC.

Registry Fix - The Windows registry is a huge file that contains thousands of Windows settings and parameters. This section will highlight any entries that are invalid or incorrect.

System Optimisation - Any parts of your computers Operating System recognized as being incompetent by the software will be shown in this section.

Startup Manager - I have in the past explained the importance of minimising the amount of unnecessary software which launches on system startup and this application makes removing it extremely simple.

Privacy Sweep - This category will list all activity history and traces on your computer. Removing them will potentially increase your computers security, or avoid potential embarrassment if you've been doing something you shouldn't have been.

Junk Files Clean - Windows stores a surprisingly large amount of rubbish that can quickly and easily identified and removed with no ill effects.

You will be given a chance to review any changes that the application plans to make although doing so would be extremely labour intensive as on my three month old laptop 40,000 issues were raised; the majority of them being 33,000 odd possible system immunisations. Giving WindowsCare the benefit of the doubt I simply clicked on repair and so far I have had no cause for concern however it is worthwhile bearing in mind that the application does allow you to back up your system settings before any changes are made, then restore them if you suffer any problems.

I don't think there's really a huge amount left to say about this application. It installed easily, it worked efficiently and it removed countless potential problems from my system in a matter of minutes. I would certainly recommend downloading and installing this fantastic piece of free software - if you are currently having problems with your system it could solve them, and if you're not then it could prevent them.