PC Pal is a software that is currently in Beta that checks your Windows installation for weaknesses and possibilities to optimize it. The process is very user friendly and requires minimal user interaction. Basically the user pushes one button and PC Pal checks the computer for problems related to security, networking, printing and performance.
A full scan does not take longer than a few minutes and results are displayed in a scrollable list. Each item can be expanded to display detailed information and a button to fix the problem. A fix could be to activate a feature in Windows, like activating the Windows Firewall or the Popup Blocker in Internet Explorer, or a link to third party software or updates to installed softwares.
Issues are divided into critical and normal ones. The three critical issues that were found on my test PC told me to activate the Windows Firewall, install an Anti-Virus software and download the latest Flash player.

What I did not like that much is that it only looks at default Windows applications like Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player ignoring other browsers or media players completely. This is a great software if you use Internet Explorer and other Microsoft softwares regularly.
I would not suggest to run it as a background process all the time but fire it up once a week or so to check for new critical issues.
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