In response to our entry about The Ultimate Troubleshooter, Gnomie Sarah Danks writes:

I work at keeping my systems clean and lean. This app sounded good, so I ran
it on my Toshiba Portege 3500 tablet running XP Pro Tablet.

Of the tasks currently running, it told me that Norton Speed Disk and the
Toshiba power manager were bad; that it knew nothing about 13 items, including
Ad-Watch and a number of the Toshiba bits that run the tablet; that 12 things
were User’s Choice or had Multiple Possibilities; and that a number of things
were OK.

The Services tab told me that the clipbook (part of the NT system as I recall)
and Norton Speed Disk were bad, then had a mix of the other types.

In Startups, once again the Toshiba power manager was bad and many of the
Toshiba tablet utilities and Ad-Watch were Unknown.

The Hardware tab contained a great deal of information which is considerably
more detailed than that which is available in Device Manager. Indeed, it told
me what protocol (a/b/g) my wireless card is running by telling me its speed,
and I’ve not been able to find that elsewhere.

However, to me the primary value of a utility like this is to give me
information about all the items running on my system. In all cases except
svchost the Findings and Recommendations boxes held a notice that such
information is only available in the registered version. If their database
already has no knowledge of standard tasks specific to my machine (over 18
months on the market) and fairly well-known apps like Ad-Watch, what reason
have I to presume that the information they will be able to give me about all
the User’s Choice and Multiple Possibility items will be of significant value?
As I read through the list of Services, I found that all those connected to
svchost had the same description as in Tasks, and no details for the
particular service. There’s actually more specific information on these items
in XP Component Services. Also, these services are all listed as Multiple
Possibilities and it took me a minute to see that there’s a button on the
right that lets me see a second set of information showing that svchost could be a virus. On top
of which, since TUT can display the properties of the svchost file, why can’t
it use that info to determine if the particular task or service is really
svchost or a virus, and return a good or bad rating accordingly? There’s no
place I could find to add information or notes, which I might like to do for
those items that came back as User’s Choice or Unknown, so that the next time
I run the app I don’t have to remember which unknowns I’ve already identified
as actually being OK.

I’ve been to, and used the information on, the Answers That Work Web site. I
know that the info is valuable. I also realize that research on all the
“stuff” that’s out there must be enormously time consuming, so it’s not really
surprising that things specific to my Toshiba and smaller apps like ClipMate
are unknown. But Ad-Watch? Spyware & malware are the “big thing” these days,
so that really should have been recognized.

The Ultimate Troubleshooter looks OK, but I prefer TaskPower from PC Mag. It
doesn’t have findings or recommendations, just a one-word rating, but it
allows me to change that rating so that once I identify things as being OK on
my system I can ignore them the next time. It also has descriptions that I can
add to if I want. And, it’s only $5.97.