Computer MOT for Windows

A MOT test is a U.K. Ministry of Transport vehicle inspection. It's thorough, so any rigorous checkup is apt to be called a "MOT test." Computer MOT from Dizzy Solutions is a free utility that automatically cleans your system, scans it for spyware and adware, and performs a variety of maintenance and tune-up operations. It uses two of the most-popular freeware utilities, CCleaner and Spybot, plus built-in Windows utilities like the disk defragmentation tool and CheckDisk. And when we say automatic, we mean "automatic" as in "no manual options" and no stopping it.

Computer MOT is portable, so you can save it wherever you'd like. However, at the end of the installation process, the program started scanning our PC right away, without asking us if we wanted it to, let alone giving us the ability to choose which tools to run. We've used CCleaner and Spybot before, so we trusted them, and the other tools Computer MOT runs are Windows system utilities. But once started, you can't stop Computer MOT without opening the Task Manager, and even then you might not be able to stop it. Certainly, when our system rebooted and ran CheckDisk, we had no choice but to let it. Eventually, the process finished, and our system rebooted again. This time, we clicked Computer MOT's desktop shortcut, hoping to access an interface and some kind of settings or log. But the program only started its scan again, so we opened Task Manager and ended the process.

Computer MOT's developers recommend running the program every six months or so. Now that we know what to expect, we think that would be an excellent idea. If you install and uninstall a lot of programs, we'd even recommend running it more often. Without the ability to choose what it does and when, it's not suitable as a regular system maintenance utility. We'd also like more control and more choices, especially when first running the tool. But for that twice-a-year tune-up, we have no problem letting Computer MOT do its thing.

• Fixes a problems with enabling Windows Updates on a computer with a particular problem.
• Defragmentation of Windows XP important system files have been added (PageDefrag) to add an extra level of repair and speed improvement.