Smooth-Sailing Utilities
Lots of packages claim to keep your PC running trouble-free. Here's the scoop on which ones really do the job.by Lincoln Spector
PC World Contributing Editor Lincoln Spector frequently writes about utilities.
Once upon a time (when PCs first got hard drives), people needed to be able to recover accidentally deleted files--so they bought programs like Norton Utilities. They also needed to scan their drives for errors and defragment their files. Today anyone can retrieve files from Windows' Recycling Bin, and the operating system has its own disk maintenance tools; increasingly, the features that used to require a separate program are being included in Windows. But companies continue to produce utilities, claiming that they are faster or better than the ones built into Windows.
It's a fact of modern life that computers have problems. Installing a new program can trash your operating system, and without regular maintenance the files on your hard drive can get so mixed up that they get strewn across it, slowing down saving and reading data.
A good suite of utilities can diagnose and fix the conflicts and flaws in your system, maintain the health of your hard drive, and help you organize your files. Ineffective utilities can waste your time, and bad utilities can leave your computer in worse condition than before you installed them.
To test the claims of utility suite vendors, we looked at four suites, each offering a somewhat different collection of tools: Iolo's System Mechanic 3.6, McAfee Utilities 4, Ontrack's SystemSuite 3, and Symantec's Norton SystemWorks 2001 Professional Edition. We skipped a fifth package, Ultra WinCleaner Utility Suite, because the new version wasn't ready in time for our review (it is scheduled for release in September). Since you may need functions that the utility suites don't offer, we also looked at a selection of stand-alone utilities, including Smith Micro's CheckIt Utilities, PowerQuest's PartitionMagic, and Vcom's DriveWorks.
We put the suites and the stand-alone programs through five common tasks: diagnosing and fixing what's wrong with your PC, taking care of your disks, managing your files, backing up your Windows environment, and protecting you and your system from external threats such as computer viruses. We recommend at least one package for most tasks, and when Windows' own built-in utility is the best choice, we note that as well.
Our conclusions are based on in-depth testing carried out by the PC World Test Center and our experience using the programs on a variety of PCs.
Of the four major packages, Ontrack's $50 SystemSuite turned out to be the best choice in most categories, was easy to use, and proved reliable.
McAfee Utilities has more modest ambitions--most obviously, it lacks an antivirus program (McAfee sells McAfee VirusScan separately for $30). On the other hand, McAfee Utilities costs only about $30 and includes many of the features that most users will need.
The name Norton has been synonymous with utilities for nearly two decades, so at first glance, Symantec's Norton SystemWorks 2001 Professional Edition should be the leading program. SystemWorks 2001 Professional's collection of tools would seem to be worth its $80 street price (Symantec also sells a version without the partition backup and fax components at a street price of $55).
But features aren't everything. Many of the Norton programs proved unreliable, with crashes and other odd behavior; you can read more about one person's experiences in "When Utilities Attack." And some of the features of SystemWorks 2001--such as Registry Tracker and Norton Diagnostics--can't be used under Windows 2000.
Iolo's System Mechanic is even more modest than McAfee, lacking not only an antivirus utility but also disk-care and system file backup features. Unfortunately, the $60 System Mechanic also lacks McAfee's modest price.
Utility Suite: Features Comparison (chart)
| Suite | Street price (5/5/01) | Hardware diagnostics | Registry cleanup | Disk scanning | Disk defragmenting | Program removal | File cleanup | File management/ archiving | Registry backup | Partition backup | Virus protection | E-mail virus scanning | Privacy tools | Other features | Comments |
| Iolo System Mechanic 3.6 877/239-4656 www.iolo.com | $60 | No | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No | Yes | StartUp boot profile manager, NetBooster network optimizer | Some interesting tools, but missing many of the major features a typical user would need. |
| McAfee Utilities 4 801/492-2626 www.mcafee-at-home.com | $30 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | Crash Protector, McAfee TaskMaster boot profile manager | A good selection of powerful tools at an attractive price, but no antivirus protection. |
| Best Buy Ontrack SystemSuite 3 800/872-2599 www.ontrack.com | $50 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | CrashProof crash protector, rescue disk | Our Best Buy offers a comprehensive selection of features at an attractive price. |
| Symantec Norton SystemWorks 2001 Professional Edition 800/441-7234 www.symantec.com | $80 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Fax software, continuous background monitoring | Plenty of features, including the only drive imaging program, but it's expensive and its quality is uneven. |
Keep Your System Running
Modern computers, operating systems, and programs are so complicated that they often crash, leaving a potentially damaged system and all sorts of rubbish lying around your hard drive. A good diagnostic program and Registry cleaner can do wonders in identifying problems on your system and making sure that everything is in working order.
Diagnostics
Recommended: Smith Micro's CheckIt Utilities, Ontrack SystemSuite 3, McAfee 4 Utilities
The first thing you see when you load Symantec's Norton SystemWorks or Ontrack's SystemSuite is a one-click option to give your system a quick physical. Either of these checkups is worth doing, but neither should be your only diagnostic tool.
SystemSuite's PC Diagnostics offers the most thorough set of tests, allowing you to find problems in the hardware of your system (such as a so-called butterfly-seek test of drive A: that tests the drive motors, as well as polygon drawing by the video card). Some of these tests take hours, and others require user interaction, so you need to carefully consider which ones you'll run if you don't just go with the defaults. However, the default settings should be adequate for most users.
McAfee Utilities' First Aid isn't as thorough as SystemSuite's program, but it's friendlier. In fact, it opens up with a nice drawing of a computer sitting on a desk. If you want to test, say, your video card and monitor, you click on the monitor image.
Norton SystemWorks Professional offers neither Ontrack SystemSuite's extensive testing options nor McAfee's visual panache, although it does have some basic diagnostic tools in the form of Norton Diagnostics. System Mechanic doesn't include a diagnostic module.
For a better hardware diagnostic program than those in any of the suites, consider Smith Micro's $50 CheckIt Utilities. As with SystemSuite, the tests are extensive, thorough, and completely under your control. CheckIt can even keep a history of your hardware configuration and benchmark results. Then, after you've fiddled with your settings and fixed any problems, you can compare how your system is doing now to how it was performing when you took the baseline measurement.
CheckIt can also give you advice. You select problems like "I added a new adapter card to my computer and now it doesn't work" or "My printer is printing strange characters and symbols" and get a list of possible solutions.
Registry Cleanup
Recommended: Symantec's Norton SystemWorks 2001 Professional Edition, Ontrack SystemSuite 3
Not all problems are hardware related. Glitches in the Registry (where Windows and your programs store their settings) can cause all sorts of conflicts. That's why you need a Registry cleaner--a program that examines your Windows Registry, lists problems, and (with your permission) fixes them. Microsoft also provides a free, bare-bones Registry cleaner program called RegClean that performs many of the functions of the suites but is much less user friendly--for instance, it doesn't show you which Registry entries it is going to remove before deleting them.
All four suites come with Registry cleaners, and they all work reasonably well, although none will solve every Registry-based problem you might have. These programs tend to err on the side of caution, as deleting the wrong item in the Registry could seriously damage Windows. Even so, you should use them only after you do a full backup of your Registry.
Of the four, SystemWorks Professional and SystemSuite stand out as the best. Norton WinDoctor in Symantec SystemWorks Professional wins particular kudos for automatically backing up the Registry before scanning it--an obvious precaution that no other suite takes, although all can back up the Registry on request.
Ontrack SystemSuite's RegistryFixer was the easiest to use for examining problems and selecting a solution. When more than one solution is possible, RegistryFixer lets you select the solution you want to try from a handy drop-down menu.
Hard Drive Care and Feeding
Hard drives need attention. They need to be scanned regularly for file-structure errors and bad sectors. They also need to be defragmented occasionally, to reunite files that have been split across different sectors.
Current versions of Windows come with perfectly good tools for both these jobs, but three of the four suites here offer scanners and defraggers that are faster or more flexible than the ones in Windows. But none of these suites improves upon Windows enough to make drive care alone worth the price of a utility suite.
Scanning
Recommended: McAfee Utilities 4, Symantec's Norton SystemWorks 2001 Professional Edition, Ontrack SystemSuite 3
A drive scanner looks for lost clusters (sections of the disk that contain data not associated with any file), cross-linked files (two files that have been assigned the same clusters of data), and other errors in your file and directory structure. If you don't mind waiting a while (sometimes hours), a scanner will physically test the surface of your disk, looking for spots that are in danger of going or have already gone bad.
McAfee Utilities, Symantec's Norton SystemWorks, and Ontrack SystemSuite all come with drive scanners that are nearly identical in function, and all seem better than ScanDisk, the one built into Windows. They can do more thorough (and therefore slower) physical tests, and check parts of the disk that ScanDisk skips, such as the partition table.
Defragmenting
Recommended: McAfee Utilities 4, Ontrack SystemSuite 3
As you create, modify, and delete files, their clusters get out of sequence--resulting in slower reads and writes. Defragging your disk puts each file's clusters in sequence and arranges your files or programs for faster access.
Windows comes with its own Disk Defragmenter, which McAfee Utilities, Norton SystemWorks, and Ontrack SystemSuite all try to improve on.
McAfee's DiskTune did the best job, providing the best defragger overall. It ran our tests smoothly, and in most of our tests, it proved faster than the competition, although all of the products took several hours to defragment the data on our test system (a Dell PC with a Pentium III 600-MHz processor, 128MB of RAM, and a 28GB drive with 7GB of data). SystemSuite's JetDefrag is another good choice--not as fast as McAfee, but faster than SystemWorks or Windows.
However, both Symantec's SpeedDisk and Windows' Disk Defragmenter had a serious problem: They were plagued by constant restarts, making it difficult to complete our tests. After some investigation, we found that the problem was with the Windows swap file, which is used to store virtual memory. As the defragging program ran, it used more memory, causing the swap file to grow, which in turn caused the defragger to restart because the contents of the disk had changed.
Symantec recommended that we change the virtual memory settings to stop the swap file from growing, as detailed in the SystemWorks readme file (but not in the manual). But even with this fix, Norton's defrag took several times longer than the defraggers bundled with the other suites. Symantec claims that it is working on a patch to deal with this problem, but it was not available to test at the time of writing.
All defraggers have this restart problem to some degree, and if another program writes something to disk during the defragging process, that too can force the defragging program to restart. It seems to make sense, therefore, to have no other program running when a defrag is in progress. However, on our test system, SystemWorks was the only program to display this problem.
McAfee Utilities has another program, ActiveTune, which defrags in the background by saving data in parts of the drive where it won't get fragmented. In our informal tests, Active Tune didn't affect performance one way or another, although it may be that it takes a long time (and a lot of writing to and reading the disk) to make a difference.
Partitioning
Recommended: DriveWorks, PartitionMagic
Some people prefer to work with their hard disk set up as one large space; others like to partition and organize their disk into multiple logical drives, each with its own drive letter. A partition manager lets you create, resize, and move partitions on the hard drive--without disturbing the data. As such, it's one of the utilities we recommend for every power user who wants to take control of their drives.
None of the utility suites reviewed here offers a partition manager. Windows includes the fdisk utility for partitioning, but using it will delete every existing file on the hard drive--so you must back up your data first and reinstall the OS, your apps, and your data after partitioning. If you want to manage partitions without disturbing data (although you should always back up anything you can't replace before making any changes), you need to buy another program for the job.
We looked at two partitioning programs, PowerQuest's PartitionMagic ($55) and Vcom's DriveWorks ($57).
PartitionMagic is the more powerful of the two programs. For one thing, it's faster, resizing an existing partition in a little more than a quarter of the time DriveWorks took. It does other tricks as well, such as password-protecting partitions and converting them between different file systems. It even comes with an extra program that helps installed applications adjust to the new drive-letter mapping that comes with partitioning.
Managing partitions--at least managing a partition you're using--is one of those jobs that can't be done from inside a multitasking environment like Windows. Nevertheless, PartitionMagic is a Windows program. How does it do its tricks? Simple. You tell it what changes you want to make, click a button, and it exits Windows, changes the partition, and reboots back into Windows.
DriveWorks costs about as much as PartitionMagic, but lacks such features as password protection and the ability to switch between multiple OSes on the same PC. So why even consider it? Because it's four utilities (disk partitioning, disk imaging, disk copying, and secure erasing of partitions) for the same price as PartitionMagic. In addition to managing partitions, DriveWorks backs them up (see "Preserve Your Windows Setup"). To get both partition management and backup from PowerQuest, you'd have to buy the $70 Drive Image as well as PartitionMagic.
Avoiding File Mania
Windows has a nasty habit of littering your disk with junk files when it crashes, and many programs can leave files behind when you uninstall them. And unless your own work habits are absolutely perfect, you might lose track of your own files too. That's why you need help cleaning out unnecessary files, organizing the necessary ones, and archiving those you want to put away for a while. Iolo's System Mechanic has the best tools for finding files suitable for deletion, but Ontrack's SystemSuite has other file management tricks up its sleeve.
However, there's one job at which all the suites we looked at fail miserably: uninstalling applications.
Program Removal
Recommended: Windows
Most Windows applications extend tentacles deep into the operating system and never let go: They put files into various directories, stick stuff into the Registry, and even deposit files in the Windows folder. These same applications come with uninstall programs that don't always remove all those tentacles. Windows' own Install/Uninstall utility, which you can access from Add/Remove Programs in Windows' Control Panel, simply launches the applications' own uninstallers.
Both Symantec's Norton SystemWorks 2001 Professional and Ontrack's SystemSuite come with more ambitious uninstaller programs, called CleanSweep and EasyUninstall, respectively, that are supposed to do a better job of removing any application. There are two approaches to this task: monitoring the installation (which CleanSweep and EasyUninstall do) or keeping an eye on any and all new files that are added to the system during an installation (which only EasyUninstall does).
Our tests showed disappointing results with monitoring an installation because of the way the monitoring works. Many modern installers actually do nothing but launch other programs. These alter your system while the uninstaller is monitoring the main installer, which is doing nothing. The result: Changes happen but aren't recorded. We ran our tests several times to ensure accuracy, but we found that CleanSweep did not work consistently: On the same machine with exactly the same data on the drive, it monitored the installation of Adobe Photoshop once, then failed to monitor it the second time. SystemSuite's EasyUninstall also failed to note that any changes had been made when we installed Photoshop.
EasyUninstall also had problems when we tried monitoring changes to the system. It monitored the installation of another program without incident, but when we tried removing that program, EasyUninstall crashed and then made the machine unbootable because it had deleted several key files, even though it was supposed to protect such files.
Both Ontrack and Symantec admitted that there are issues with their uninstallers, but they were unable to provide us with solutions. Basically, modern installation programs are too complex for uninstalling utilities to deal with. We advise you to stick with the uninstallation routine recommended by the program's vendor and not use these uninstallers, because they don't work.
File Cleanup
Recommended: Iolo System Mechanic 3.6
Norton Systemworks' CleanSweep and Ontrack SystemSuite's EasyUninstall aren't totally worthless, since they do another job very well: cleaning out unnecessary files. System Mechanic and McAfee Utilities can also do this.
But Iolo's System Mechanic has the best file cleaner, making it the one job this suite excels at. You can search for duplicate or obsolete files--and you can easily define just what an obsolete file is. You can limit the search by file extension, date, or location. Once System Mechanic finds the files, you can delete them or move them to a different location, such as another folder, partition, or drive.
By contrast, McAfee Utilities offers only a slimmed-down version of the company's separately sold uninstaller and cleanup program, McAfee QuickClean. This simple program is easy to use but doesn't offer much control. It gives you the option to shred your unwanted files so they can't be recovered, but not to store them elsewhere--a far more practical choice for most people.
The capabilities of Symantec's SystemWorks Professional and of Ontrack SystemSuite fall in between these extremes. They each have a quick, easy cleanup tool similar to McAfee's, plus a more substantial program that lets you filter your search. But neither of these programs is as flexible as System Mechanic.
File Management
Recommended: Ontrack SystemSuite 3
Ontrack's SystemSuite offers two neat file management tools--one major, one minor. The minor one, Size Manager, can display your drive as a bar graph, showing just how much room each folder and its subfolders are taking.
The major one is PowerDesk 4 Pro (which is also available separately for about $20). PowerDesk is the file manager that Windows Explorer should have been. It lets you view, copy, and print the contents of just about any file; easily upload and download files using the Internet's FTP protocol; and copy and move files to folders that aren't currently visible.
In addition to PowerDesk, SystemSuite offers Zip Tools, a very robust program that extends PowerDesk's compression features with tricks like zipping files and attaching them to e-mail, zipping files in Windows Explorer with a single mouse click, and backing up your documents.
McAfee's similar Zip Manager also integrates with Windows Explorer. It's a decent, basic tool similar to WinZip.
Preserve Your Windows Setup
It's all too easy to break Windows and create problems that don't go away with a reboot. Run a buggy program or change your configuration, and--boom!--your CD-ROM drive won't work. Or Windows won't boot at all.
System meltdowns are why you need ways to back up and restore the key files of your Windows configuration. Or for the ultimate in protection, you might want to back up your entire partition or hard drive so you can easily restore it.
Registry Backup
Recommended: Windows Millennium Edition, Ontrack SystemSuite 3
Three of the four suites (but not Iolo's System Mechanic) have tools that can take a "snapshot" of the Windows Registry and other important system files, and then restore these files from the snapshot. So does Windows Millennium Edition.
The System Restore feature of Windows Me takes snapshots of the Registry and other files at regular intervals, and at your request. If Windows is so broken it won't boot, you can restore the files from Win Me's Emergency Boot Disk. If you have Windows Me, you don't need to buy another program just for this purpose.
McAfee Utilities, Norton SystemWorks, and Ontrack SystemSuite all come with their own Registry backup programs. If you don't have Windows Me, use one of them. Besides, if you're using a suite to clean and tune up your Registry, it's handy (and a good idea) to use the Registry backup that's at your fingertips before you start modifying.
SystemSuite's SystemSaver is the best of the lot. It's simple and straightforward to use, and it offers the option to save your backups as.zip archives. Best of all, you control which files and settings you want to back up. If you decide, for instance, that the structure of your Start menu is worth saving, you can keep it.
McAfee's Registry Wizard performs decent, uncomplicated Registry backups and restores (as well as Registry cleanup). But the program lacks SystemSuite's versatility. It's also way too easy to inadvertently overwrite one backup with another.
Norton Registry Tracker is far more ambitious than the others. It's also far more complex and confusing, and this means that it is not as effective.
By default, Registry Tracker doesn't track the entire Registry. If you don't go in and fiddle with the settings, you may discover that you didn't back up the right part of the Registry until it's too late. Registry Tracker is also not installed if your OS is Windows 2000: As with several other components of Norton Utilities, Symantec did not update this tool for Windows 2000.
Partition Backup
Recommended: Vcom DriveWorks
Ultimately, there's no protection like full protection. A partition backup program makes a copy of your entire partition, or your entire drive, including every file and setting. You can then return everything to exactly the condition it was in when you made the copy--data, programs, Windows, the works.
Of course, that kind of backup can take a lot of time and disk space. And like partition management, partition backup can't be done within Windows: All partition backup programs must be the only application running, so you have to exit Windows to do the backup. A partition restore should also be approached with some caution: You can't do just a partial restore of a partition. Although Norton Ghost and PowerQuest's Drive Image do allow you to restore individual files from a partition backup, if you restore an entire partition, every change made since the backup was done will be irreversibly lost.
Norton SystemWorks Pro is the only suite with a partition backup program--Norton Ghost. Ghost is also sold separately, and it's not part of the $55 truncated version, SystemWorks 2001.
Unfortunately, Ghost is not friendly; in fact, its terminology may scare some users. If you tell Ghost to back up your hard drive, the utility asks if you want to "proceed with partition dump." A dump is the last place we'd want to put our files. And if your "dump" is larger than 2GB, you'll be requested to "Insert Next Media" even if you're backing up to a hard drive with plenty of room. Ghost also has the minimal interface you'd expect in a program aimed at computing professionals.
What's worse, we found Ghost occasionally unreliable. Although it usually performed our tests without problems, sometimes a restored partition was unbootable because of missing or corrupted files, and we couldn't start the PC using the bootable CD-Rs Ghost created during a backup. Even with Symantec's assistance, we could not fix these glitches.
PowerQuest's $70 Drive Image worked through all of our tests without fuss, and the files were always restored. Our tests also showed Drive Image to be nearly twice as fast as Ghost in all operations.
Drive Image is easier to use than Ghost, although it too is more suitable for users with some experience. The on-screen commands are clear and understandable, but the program's error messages tell you nothing and are horribly documented.
On the other hand, Vcom has made its partition backup program as easy to use as its partition manager. But that's because DriveWorks does both backup and partitioning. DriveWorks may not run within Windows, but it looks like Windows. And you can resize a partition or back it up from the same Start button, making life easier if you want to do a backup before you change anything.
But the low cost of DriveWorks ($57, compared with the cost of PartitionMagic and Drive Image combined) has its trade-offs. DriveWorks lacks Ghost's and Drive Image's functionality. For instance, it cannot write to a CD-R or CD-RW disc, and it can't restore an individual file from a backup. And DriveWorks is even slower than Ghost. However, DriveWorks' ease of use and lower price mean that it gets our recommendation.
Shield Yourself From Harm
You've been told over and over that you need to guard against viruses and prying eyes--and all four of the suites reviewed here offer some kind of safety and privacy tools. No single program gets our recommendation in this category, but several of the suites have some nice features. For instance, Norton SystemWorks beats all the other suites in virus protection.
Antivirus
Recommended: Symantec's Norton SystemWorks 2001 Professional Edition
Make no mistake about it, a good antivirus program is the most important utility you should own--the one absolute must-have tool. It's so important, in fact, that PC World will be doing a full comparative review of antivirus programs in our next issue, where we will be testing the ability of antivirus programs to find and kill viruses. In this story we look only at the speed of the antivirus modules and how easy they are to use.
The important features of any modern antivirus program (aside from the ability to find viruses) are easy updates, speed of virus scanning, integration into Windows, and e-mail support. Screening e-mail is an especially important capability, since many viruses travel by e-mail these days.
Only two suites, Norton SystemWorks and Ontrack SystemSuite, come with antivirus programs. Of those two, only Norton AntiVirus has true e-mail support. NAV integrates with the major e-mail programs (including Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, and Netscape Messenger) and checks e-mail coming into your computer via the Internet's generic POP3 e-mail standard, aiming to catch viruses before you receive them. This approach also works with other e-mail programs that use the POP3 standard to receive e-mail. Norton AntiVirus, which we found far more stable than the other programs in SystemWorks 2001 Professional, is also available separately for $40.
SystemSuite's VirusScanner, by contrast, scans e-mail attachments only when they are saved to a drive.
Privacy Tools
Recommended: McAfee Utilities 4
Is someone else watching you? Windows keeps details of what you're doing in a number of ways, and it is possible for someone to read these and see what you've been doing on your PC. If you want to protect your privacy, you'll have to regularly wipe out certain files and lists.
All four suites offer tools to purge these files, including the Internet cache and history, and the list of recently used documents. Cookies are small files used by Web sites to identify you. SystemSuite has the best cookie remover, making it easy to select just the cookies you want to delete. SystemSuite has similar tools for clearing out the Internet cache and history.
To keep your data truly private, you have to encrypt it. McAfee Utilities is the clear winner here: It comes with PGP, widely regarded as one of the best encryption programs around, with easy-to-set-up tools for encrypting files, folders, and e-mail on the fly.
The only other suite that includes encryption is SystemSuite, as part of PowerDesk 4 Pro. But PowerDesk's encryption is nowhere near as easy to use as PGP--if you use your encrypted files frequently, you'll be tempted to keep them open to everyone. PowerDesk also lacks PGP's easy e-mail integration.
All four suites let you destroy a file so that it cannot be recovered after deletion--they overwrite the area of the disk where the file was stored. You can read more about these and other products to protect your privacy in our "Fortress PC" story in the May issue.
No Size Fits All
Although we have selected Ontrack's SystemSuite 3 as our Best Buy, chances are that no suite will fill all your utility needs. Even SystemSuite lacks tools that we would like to see (such as proper e-mail virus scanning), and that lack may pose problems for some users. If you buy McAfee Utilities, for instance, you should definitely invest in an additional antivirus program and even a full partition backup program, such as Drive Image or DriveWorks.
You don't want to break the bank buying utilities. If you pick a strong package such as SystemSuite 3 and supplement it to fit your situation, you'll be well prepared for the inevitable computer emergencies and housekeeping chores.
PC World Contributing Editor Lincoln Spector frequently writes about utilities.
Solo or Suite?
What's the best way to fill your utility needs and keep your PC running smoothly? Should you buy an all-in-one suite or several stand-alone products? Neither solution is satisfactory.
No single suite can completely satisfy everyone's utility needs, but building a collection of stand-alone utilities would be far more expensive than buying a suite.
Your best bet is to buy a good suite and then augment it with any additional utilities that you need. If you get McAfee Utilities, for instance, you should definitely invest in an additional antivirus program. You might also consider a full partition backup program, such as Drive Image.
Obviously, you don't want to break the bank buying utilities. Ask yourself what features you need most of all, and make your choices accordingly.
When Utilities Attack
When utility suites go bad, watch out. Ironically, you might buy one of these programs to back up your vital system files, only to wish you had made such a backup before you installed it.
Consider the case of Roedy Green, a consultant in New Westminster, British Columbia. Green had been a fan of Norton Utilities and Norton SystemWorks for years, but when he installed SystemWorks 2001 on his Windows NT machine, what followed was a nightmare. The first time around, the installation proceeded without a hitch. Then, Green says, when he tried to run the program a second time, "nothing happened."
So he tried uninstalling, then reinstalling it. But now the program wouldn't install. Nor would it uninstall. "I tried maybe 10 or 20 times to uninstall it. I just couldn't believe that this thing wouldn't work." He eventually succeeded in getting SystemWorks installed. But first he had to manually remove every reference to Symantec from the Registry, then delete every Symantec.dll file.
Windoctor and Office 2000 Don't Mix
He has since managed to get SystemWorks running, but he is still having headaches with clients using it. For instance, under Windows 2000, the SystemWorks component WinDoctor reports a large number of problems if Office 2000 is installed. "Symantec admits that [WinDoctor] does this, and they say it's Office 2000's fault because it has a funny way of installing itself. Their suggestion was to tell WinDoctor to ignore these errors, which is an odd way to deal with this problem."
He has also encountered the same problems with the Symantec disk defragger that our tests found: "It kept restarting. I couldn't track down what it is that makes it keep restarting. One thing I did find that was causing it was LiveUpdate, [Symantec's] own updater application, which is rather embarrassing for them."
But Green still uses the program and will probably buy the next version as well. "I will certainly have a look at it, because they might have listened to my complaints. I think the problem (with this version) was testing, and pushing the product out to market before it was ready."
Skipping the Shrink-Wrap
Don't want to buy and install a utility suite? You can get many of the same benefits these days through online services.
McAfee.com provides the most comprehensive online utilities service. For a yearly subscription, it offers extensive diagnostics and system optimization and protection tools. McAfee. com's services include virus scanning--whether you're connected to the Internet or not--a performance optimizer, advice on configuring Windows, an uninstaller, and a tool for recovering damaged files. Most of these online services are based on the same code that underlies McAfee Utilities.
But Web-based utility services have their own problems. Despite claims that McAfee.com works with Internet Explorer 4.0 and higher, many of its features refused to work when we tried them with Internet Explorer 5.0. The problem was fixed when we upgraded, on McAfee's recommendation, to Internet Explorer 5.5.
Ironically, one of the features we could not test until we upgraded the browser was Oil Change, a tool for upgrading your software to the latest versions available.
Oil Change is one of several Web-based upgrade aids. These sites scan your hard drive for programs, and then tell you what updates are available for your applications. They also give you information to help you decide if the changes are worthwhile, and provide links for downloading the necessary files.
Oil Change charges $19.95 a year for its services. Two of the site's competitors, Catchup.com and Norton Web Services, are free. (Both Catchup. com and Norton Web Services are operated by CNet Networks, a PC World competitor.)
Both Norton SystemWorks and Ontrack SystemSuite, by the way, try to pass off a free online application updating tool as a feature you've paid for. SystemWorks has a link to Norton Web Services, and SystemSuite points you to updates.com. But both of these services are free, whether or not you've purchased a suite.
Ontrack's SystemSuite 3
No suite does everything, and what they do they don't always do perfectly. But Ontrack's $50 SystemSuite 3 came out on top in six of our categories and offers the best overall mixture of functionality, ease of use, dependability, and price. It's the best suite of the bunch if you want to diagnose hardware problems or back up the Registry, thanks to its excellent diagnostics and maintenance tools. Nothing beats this package come spring-cleaning time, whether you want to clean out your hard drive or tidy up the Registry. And the final touch is the bundled PowerDesk Pro, the file manager to beat all file managers.
Get demo versions of most of the utility suites reviewed in this article from PCWorld.com's Downloads.