PC Pitstop PC Matic

Previously, the main window for PC Matic featured many brightly colored icons. In the current edition, the colors are seriously toned down, for a more professional look. In addition, the maintenance statistics bar at bottom only shows when you click to reveal it.

You can download and run scans with PC Matic for free. However, if you want it to take any action based on its scan findings, you'll have to pay the price.

The Super Shield component checks every program that tries to launch against its whitelist, and blocks any that aren't on the list. Here it has allowed a legitimate installer to run, but blocked the downloader that was bundled with it.

Super Shield blocks every program that isn't on its whitelist, without making any judgment as to whether it's malicious. Here it has blocked Adobe's update manager, probably because it's a newer version than the whitelisted one.

You can click the Super Shield icon for a list of recent activity. When I tested PC Matic with actual malware, it blocked them all, but marked more than half as unknown. On repeating this test after 24 hours, I found that it correctly marked them all as bad.

In addition to scanning for malware, PC Matic can perform a wide variety of system cleanup and optimization tasks.

Once the scan finishes, this busy screen gives an overview of what PC Matic found. For this review, the most important concern was the indication of high security threats found by the scan.

As a side benefit, PC Matic's scan checks your system for popular applications with security patches missing.

To test PC Matic's ability to detect and block malware from very fresh malicious URLs, I turned on Monitor File Access. I also switched the notification mode to display a prompt for action rather than just float a transient popup.

In every case, PC Matic identified the downloaded malware, reporting that it was not known to be a good file. However, it also popped up a similar warning for valid files, like the Windows component shown here.