Thanks for the comments, Stefan. I’m sure people will find your added advice quite useful. I read your review when the software came out as well It’s true — this was a very hard piece to cover because of the approach. It was supposed to be a fresh look at the program (and not just a look a the upgrade from 3 to 4), but with 50 tools and an insane amount of customizability, it was very hard to keep this from becoming an unofficial SKTools 4 manual.

Thanks for reading!

@ Clean! - I mostly use the automated feature which I’ve pinned to my Start menu and which is placed on my Today screen. This does the basic things, including the internet cache which can clean up several MB’s sometimes. However, the actual Clean! from inside SKTools often gives me some more results and gives me the freedom of deleting or keeping them. It does indeed take quite long to get Clean! done.

@ Optimize and Tune Up - I don’t really use these. I don’t need to hack this deep into the OS, the default Optimize settings must have been chosen for a reason and I don’t plan on/need to adjust these. It’s really good to have these though, for example ROM builders are often concerned about page pools etc so they want the Optimize settings to be… well, optimal.

@ Notification queue - I do happen to have a lot of ghost notifications (one notification but then tens of them, all the same). They don’t bother me in the usage of the program but I occasionaly remove them. No idea how the recreate themselves every time though!

@ Backup - I do remember that SKTools had a solution for what to do after a hard reset. I believe they had some self-expanding program so that you could at least restore the backup (including SKTools full version). Not sure though, as I’ve moved to Sprite Backup when SKTools was still in it’s 3.x versions.

@ Registry editor - Using Resco Explorer as well. It’s easier, quicker, and the UI fits the purpose better.

@ Registry optimizer - In fact the registry optimizer is something I use a lot. Over time and after installing/uninstalling some programs, the registry can become cluttered. Often when I check out the Registry optimizer I find out that I can decrease the size of my registry with 9% or 13%! So I run this tool, and my registry is nice and compact again. Never had any problems with this tool doing any damage to the registry.

@ User Interface - The standard comments have for a while been “MemMaid has the better interface, SKTools has the best / more advanced features”. I think this is still true. Categories might be useful to some, but like you - I don’t use them. I prefer the long list now as well. Perhaps a view with 32×32 icons and a small caption for each item would work. There could be 4 rows with 3 icons on the screen at one time and the user can scroll to move down in the list. This would greatly improve the ease of searching for the desired tool. And if SKKV Software would want to keep the categories, they can simply add seperator lines between apps in a category. For example: have a line with the title “Clean”, and then the items that belong in the category. Then (no matter if there are 2, 4 or 12 icons in the category) have a new seperator line for the new category with the title, and then the items in that category. I know the SKKV Software guys will read your review because they want to know what reviewers say, hopefully they’ll take a look at the comments as well.

@ Price - This is great. SKTools was cheaper in the 3.x series but at that time I simply didn’t understand why they didn’t raise the price. It was incredibly cheap for what it offered back then so the current price tag seems great. It shows that the developers think the software is very valuable, while also showing that they want to keep it under the 19.95 price tag. Even if the user only uses a small percentage of the SKTools features, it will be worth the money.

@ Ragart - Great job on taking up the task to review SKTools. It’s a large piece of software so there’s a lot to write about. And there are just so many features that you don´t use that you simply cannot discuss everything! I think a review like yours is a great help for possible new SKTools customers. That´s why I also wanted to add my comments on some of the tools so that readers might also have a bit different perspective of how someone else uses SKTools as part of his daily routine.

Thanks for the good read!