Advanced SystemCare Pro 5 Review [Giveaway]

Windows users have lots of choices when it comes to maintaining and optimizing the operating system. They can use built-in tools, make use of single-purpose applications or install a full system maintenance suite like IOBit’s Advanced SystemCare 5. The software is provided as a limited free version and a professional version that are both packed with system tools that improve system performance, clean junk files, defragment hard drives and fix spyware problems: there is hardly anything that Advanced SystemCare does not provide a tool for.

The clean looking interface displays the four core modules, and the PC health status in the footer area on the screen.

advanced systemcare pro

The program recommends to run the deep care module first to tune-up the PC right away. Deep Care basically is a set of optimizations the program performs, from defragmenting the Registry to fixing vulnerabilities and optimizing the system configuration.

Unlike other tool collections who do not give you a say in what to run and what not, Advanced SystemCare gives you the option to run all, only select or even none of the modules (which would not make a lot of sense).

deep care

Scans take anywhere from one or two minutes to ten or more, depending on the PC. Results are displayed for each scan individually, with options to display details for all issues that have been found. It is recommended to look at the details before running the optimization to avoid issues later on.

Here is a list of all Deep Care modules:

Full Malware Removal – Scans the system for spyware and security threats.
Deep Registry Fix – Scans the Registry for errors, broken links and other issues.
Registry Defrag – Optimizes the Registry to speed up system start.
System Optimization – Optimizes select system parameters to speed up the PC.
Startup Optimization – Optimizes and delays startup items to speed up the start of the computer.
Shortcut Fix – Fixes or removes broken and invalid shortcuts.
Privacy Sweep – Deletes web browser, Windows and third party application history information from the PC. Supports Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Opera, as well as
Junk Files Clean – Deletes temporary files that are not longer need to free up disk space.
Security Defense – Offers to block known, malicious or unwanted websites, cookies and ActiveX-based spyware.
Disc Scan – Scans the hard drives for disk errors and attempts to fix them.
Vulnerability Fix – Checks for vulnerabilities, e.g. security patches that have not been installed – and prompts to install them.
Disk Defragment – A defragmentation tool. Advanced SystemCare blocks the defragmentation tool from running on Solid State Drives, a fragmentation scan is however still performed on those drives.

Advanced SystemCare Pro 5 creates a backup before it performs the selected actions. It is therefor always possible to restore the system if issues are encountered afterwards.

The Quick Care module runs only some of the scans that Deep Scan offers. The optimizations are configured to run automatically when the system is idle and on log on. The parameters can be changed in the options, for instance to only run select modules automatically or none at all.

New users should look at the – extensive – program settings. Every Deep Care and Quick Care module comes with its own set of options. Privacy Sweep for instance displays additional objects that can be removed when the module is run. It is on the other hand also possible to exclude a browser or program for the cleanup.
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Kindle for iPad, iPhone update outshines iBooks

Amazon updated its Kindle software for the iPad and iPhone/iPod touch on Wednesday introducing new features that ensure its app stays on the top of the e-reader pile, even as it pushes its own tablet platform with the Kindle Fire.

The update includes some iPad-only goodies that take advantage of the device’s larger screen, as well as some general changes for all versions that replicate and one-up features found in Apple’s own iBooks, making it a much better all-around solution for users who’d rather just have one e-reading app on their devices. Here’s a breakdown of what’s new:
All devices

Kindle Personal Documents Service. Both iPhone and iPad users can now take advantage of Amazon’s Kindle Personal Document Service, which lets users email their own documents to special Send-to-Kindle email addresses assigned to each Amazon Kindle user account. The document will then show up in their iPad, iPhone or iPod touch Kindle app library, and be available for re-download across devices. Note that this does incur a fee, and requires a few initial steps to get set up. You can check out Amazon’s full guide to its Personal Document Service here for more info.

PDF Reader. Kindle apps for iOS now feature a built-in PDF reader that can open files from Mail or Safari, or PDFs transferred directly from a user’s computer via iTunes. The PDF feature also works with documents transferred using the newly-integrated Personal Documents Service mentioned above. This was the main (if not the only) advantage of iBooks over the Kindle app in my opinion, so now that it’s gone I’ll probably just use the Amazon app full-time.
iPad-only

New magazine design. Amazon is clearly trying to stay on top of the competition from Newsstand here, and in fact, its magazines now work with Newsstand. Amazon’s Kindle newspaper and magazine library now extends to the over 400 titles available on the Kindle Fire.

Print replica textbooks. Those still in school will benefit greatly from this feature, which makes thousands of print replica textbooks available on the iPad via the Kindle app. Textbook rentals are also available, and the print replica formatting means that it’ll be even easier for students to follow along in class with page and section numbering while also enjoying the advantages of a digital edition (searching, linked content, etc.)

This is a big, solid update from a company that’s currently nursing its own competitive tablet platform, and I must say I’m pretty impressed. What do you think of the new Kindle apps?
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iPhone app sales kicking app on Android Market, says study

different app stores this past year, research firm Distimo found that sales of iPhone apps alone in Apple's iPhone App Store generated four times the revenue seen by Android Market. Sales of iPad apps in the App Store chalked up the second highest revenue total.

The standings were compiled by looking at the total revenue created by the 200 highest grossing apps across each store. For the purposes of its report, Distimo separated Apple's store into two distinct entities--one for iPhone apps and one for iPad apps.

One country Apple can thank for its app store sales is China, where downloads jumped dramatically in 2011. Comparing China with the U.S., Chinese iPhone users accounted for 30 percent of the total downloads between the two countries, while Chinese iPad owners generated 44 percent of the downloads among the two nations.

Apple's App Store did see a drop in downloads twice this past year--once in February before the new iPad debuted and again in October before the iPhone 4S launched. But each dip was followed by a jump in downloads after the new device hit the market.

(Credit: Distimo)

Beyond Apple's iPhone and iPad stores and Google's Android Market, Distimo's full 2011 report examined Amazon's Appstore, BlackBerry App World, Nokia's Ovi Store, and Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. Among those, almost all doubled the number of apps being offered this year.

Collectively, the major app stores now offer more than 1 million apps. But Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 store showed the greatest relative growth in 2011, increasing its available apps by more than 400 percent, noted Distimo.

Counting just the number of free apps, Android Market was the leader this year, outpacing iPhone apps this past June. iPad aps took third place, followed by the Ovi Store, Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, BlackBerry App World, and Amazon's Appstore.


This past year also proved the success of the freemium and in-app purchase models, where users grab an app for free but pay for individual options or a more full-featured version.

Among the 200 top-grossing apps, Google's Android Market generated 65 percent of its sales from freemium apps, while iPhone apps captured 50 percent from freemium software.

And drilling down just to games, always one of the most popular categories, the three largest stores for gamers were Apple's App Store (for iPhone apps only) with 79,077 games, the Android Market with 46,045, and the App Store (for iPad) with 28,683. However, the Windows Phone 7 store showed strong growth in the number of games offered, surpassing the Ovi Store and BlackBerry App World this year.

So, which apps proved to be most popular in 2011, according to Distimo?

Based on the most downloads, Angry Birds nested on the top perch, followed by Facebook, Skype, Angry Birds Rio, and Google Maps. Rounding up the Top 10 were Apple's iBooks, Angry Birds Seasons, Fruit Ninja, Talking Top Cat, and Twitter.
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Apple Acquires Anobit: Bringing NAND Endurance Technology In-House

I'd seen speculation that Apple was going to drop $500M on Anobit over the past few weeks. Ars Technica also published a piece believing the acquisition to be true, and it looks like the office of Israel's Prime Minister tweeted a bit of a confirmation (Anobit is based in Israel). I looked at Anobit's extremely vague technology descriptions and dug a bit into their patent portfolio to better understand Apple's motivation behind the acquisition.

If you've followed our SSD coverage over the years you'll know that NAND endurance was a valid concern in the early days of consumer SSDs. When Intel arrived on the scene with the X25-M, its controller technology included a number of enhancements to work around common NAND errors and degradation over time. Other companies followed suit and eventually NAND error correction and reliability were major selling points of SSD controllers.

More recently, Micron announced that it would be baking ECC technology into a separate line of NAND called Clear NAND. Micron believes that in the future if you don't have access to a controller that does significant ECC or a NAND solution that includes active ECC technology that you won't be able to deliver competitive NAND based storage.

Today not much of this is necessary for consumer SSDs, even forthcoming 20nm IMFT NAND is still good for 3000 - 5000 program/erase cycles, which is more than enough for client use. However if you're using greater than 2-bit-per-cell MLC (e.g. 3-bit-per-cell MLC) then the need for better error correction is more urgent.

Smartphones and tablets need not-insignificant amounts of NAND (16 - 64GB for high end devices today, twice that next year). The cost of this NAND isn't all that much in the grand scheme of things, at the low end you're looking at several dollars and at the high end the cost is more than offset by the ridiculous increase in device pricing. The problem is not at the high end but what happens when you start selling cheaper phones. If we are indeed heading toward a future where mainstream computing is done on smartphones, then we're also headed toward a future where all smartphones need dozens of GBs of NAND on-board. That includes the ultra cheap devices as well as the high-end flagships.

Price sensitivity in these devices means that the high grade, compute NAND used in SSDs isn't what gets used by smartphone manufacturers. Instead you get the mid-grade stuff at best, but more likely you find some slow, 3-bit-per-cell NAND in the cheaper devices. There's no room (physically or budget) for sweet SSD controllers by Intel, Marvell or SandForce, thus NAND management is typically handled by an eMMC controller (or something similar) integrated into the phone/tablet's applications processor (e.g. Snapdragon, Tegra 3, A5, etc...).

Cheaper MLC NAND trades off endurance and performance for cost. How do you get to have your cake and eat it too? Well if you're set on using cheaper NAND, you have to do more processing on the controller side to clean up the data you're reading back from the shaky NAND. This isn't a problem on day one, but it becomes an issue over the months/years as you've written more data to the NAND. Cells have to be periodically refreshed, storing redundant data becomes necessary, the controller must recover/reconstruct lost data, etc... Every company has their approach to dealing with these problems. It was the first solutions to these problems that allowed consumer SSDs to use cheaper MLC NAND, and the solution to the smartphone/tablet issue is of a similar nature.

Anobit appears to be applying a lot of signal processing techniques in addition to ECC to address the issue of NAND reliability and data retention. In its patents there are mentions of periodically refreshing cells whose voltages may have drifted, exploiting some of the behaviors of adjacent cells and generally trying to deal with the things that happen to NAND once it's been worn considerably.

Through all of these efforts, Anobit is promising significant improvements in NAND longevity and reliability. At the high end Anobit promises 50,000 p/e cycles out of consumer grade MLC NAND, and in the smartphone/tablet space Anobit promises more useful lifespan out of 3-bit-per-cell MLC NAND.

As for why Apple would want Anobit, the potential reasons are huge. First the company was a cheap buy for Apple, although expensive if you look at the market as a whole (SandForce went for ~$370M). If all Apple gains from Anobit is bringing some smart NAND folks on staff the cost won't really break the bank. The obvious fit is to integrate Anobit's technology into Apple's ARM based SoCs. These SoCs already talk to NAND directly and integrating better error correction/reliability processing into the SoC just makes sense. For all we know, Apple already uses this technology in its SoCs and is simply acquiring Anobit to make it more difficult for competing SoC makers to do the same. Integration and assimilating value are the cornerstones of building a good SoC, this move makes sense (assuming Anobit's technology is actually good).

Note that if you look at the graph above, continuing to use 3-bit-per-cell NAND requires more than just standard ECC. It's clear Apple wants to continue to use value NAND in its devices, Anobit is simply a guarantee that it will be able to do so in the future.

At the other end of the spectrum, Anobit has enough technology to build a decent SSD controller (it already appears to do so for enterprise SSDs). If Apple wanted to really commoditize SSDs, it could use Anobit to produce its own SSD controllers. Apple would then simply buy NAND from memory vendors instead of the present day solution of buying a complete SSD solution for its Macs. This would shave a not insignificant portion of the BOM (bill of materials) cost of SSD production, which would help Apple transition to SSDs in more of its systems. This is more of a longshot as far as I'm concerned as, at least today, there are a lot of low-cost, competent controller makers in the SSD space.

Apple has been internalizing many of the pieces used in its SoCs over the past few years. It even owns a 9.5% stake in Imagination Technologies, the GPU company that supplies IP for Apple's SoCs. While I understand Apple's motives from the standpoint of a mostly vertically integrated hardware/software entity, there is a bit of defocus that comes with going too far down this path. I'm still not sold on the idea of Apple becoming a full fledged silicon vendor. It makes sense today, but as these SoCs become hugely complex, billion+ transistor devices I'm unsure if Apple wants to assume even more of the burden involved in bringing one of those parts to market.

Until we get to that point however, acquistions like Anobit come relatively cheaply for Apple and should help guarantee NAND reliability and performance for its more cost sensitive products (particularly as NAND geometries continue to shrink going forward). If Anobit's technology is up to muster, it should also mean that Apple will be able to continue to scale up NAND capacities in its devices without resorting to increasing device costs. NAND is ultimately driven by Moore's Law, however reliability doesn't follow the same curve by default. Integration of Anobit-like technologies are necessary to ensure it does.
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