All the PC Tools utilities have the same look and feel so, if you have used any of its other products, the common graphical style of the opening screen will look familiar.

Directly after installation you’ll see a Buy Now button at the bottom of the left-hand menu.

Clicking on this button opens a registration box for the purchase name and a registration number. Without these the program will run in demo mode only. When you purchase the program the registration is emailed to you if you buy online or is included with the boxed product.

PC Tools provides a one-year subscription to live updates and product support. The user interface looks rather like a web page with a vertical row of four buttons: Status, Start scan, Settings and About, down the left-hand side.

Clicking on Status does open a page with a small amount of status information, such as the user name and number of recoverable files found, but it also bears two scan option buttons: Start full scan or Advanced scan.

The Start full scan button by default duplicates the action of the Start scan button in the left-hand column, although this can be changed to Advanced scan by checking a box on the Settings page. It’s also possible to enable an activity log from this page.

Advanced scan only differs by the inclusion of an entry box for a simple filter string that’s applied to the files on the scanned volume. A live update button on the top menu bar makes it extremely easy to connect to the PC Tools site to check for and download program updates.

A free trial version is available to download from the PC Tools website, but this version bizarrely doesn’t allow you to recover files.

PC Tools File Recover is a simple-to-use data recovery utility that will suit the less technically inclined user. For the power user, its limited operating system support could be a drawback.

This article is part of a grooup test. All articles in the test are as follows:
A quick recovery
Active Data Recovery Active@ Undelete
Binary Biz Virtual Lab
Ontrack Easy Recovery Lite
PC Tools File Recover 5
R-Tools Technology R-Studio
Stellar Phoenix Fat + NTFS
Retaining control of your data 
Broken drives and professional data retrieval labs