Toolwiz Care

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on December 20, 2011

Toolwiz Care is an all-in-one system cleaning and optimizing tool. It's actually a number of useful tools bundled together, including a registry cleaner, disk cleaner, and various system utilities and tweaks. It's designed to help users boost the performance of older PCs by cleaning out junk files and entries and defragmenting disk drives. But users who boot from a solid-state drive (SSD) should avoid the disk defragmenting tool and some of the program's tweaks, which can undo some of the changes many users make deliberately when installing SSDs.

Toolwiz Care's colorful user interface is fairly typical of system care utilities, with its various functions accessible by toolbar icons: Checkup, Cleanup, Speedup, Security, Tools, and App Manager. Some functions are accessible under multiple headings, and the program starts with an all-in-one Checkup scan and repair. We scanned our system but chose to access the various cleaners and optimizers separately, in part to gauge each tool's effectiveness but also to avoid triggering an automatic defrag of our SSD boot drive. But the various individual tools let us select or deselect items to scan, clean, or ignore. The program cleaned unneeded registry and disk items with no ill effects. Toolwiz identifies security risks, too, such as networks shares. The Privacy cleaner empties browser caches and other places where personal data lurks. While the cleanup tools are fairly straightforward, we recommend more care in the system tweaks department, since the program can disable some error-reporting features, alter your network settings, and make other changes, some of which can speed up older computers, and others of which can cause hours of troubleshooting. When in doubt, leave it out.

Most users who boot from one of the new, ultrafast SSDs probably won't need all of the tweaks and tools Toolwiz offers, though it packs many features that will be of interest to any Windows user, such as the App Manager, which gives detailed information about your programs, plus many interesting extras like a Duplicate File Finder, Disk Doctor, Repair Network, and File Shredder and Recovery Tools. As always, we recommend using any system cleaner or tweaker with care and knowledge.