If you get into problems with Windows, it's usually expensive to call on advice from a support service. There's a market for automated diagnostics and repair, but many of these programs aim at just one aspect; maybe file and registry repair, disk defragmentation or spyware removal. Avanquest's Fix-It Utilities 8 aims to be a jack of all trades and is designed so that, at its simplest level, it can be used as a one-click cure.

The licence permits you to install the application on three separate PCs and the utilities it includes divide into two main categories: System Health and System Protection. Within System Health are utilities to diagnose faults in most hardware areas, including using your hard drive's SMART system to predict drive failures. The Fix-It CD itself acts as a rescue CD and includes copies of RecoveryCommander, BootFixer and a utility for manual partitioning.

System Protection has been bumped up by the simple expedient of grafting on Trend Micro's AV and anti-spyware applications. In purely monetary terms this could save you the cost of a separate Internet Security package, though with Free AVG around, this may not be the saving it once was.

As bad luck and rural living would have it, we had a power interruption in the middle of performing a One-Click Optimise, right in the middle of defragmenting the D drive on our test system. Apart from having to restart the PC and run Fix-It again, the software continued to the end of the task without a problem.

Some of the error messages in Fix-It 8 are unhelpful, to say the least. For example, Disk Cleaner offers to remove redundant files in categories such as unneeded backups and left-over installations. You just tick the boxes for the categories you want to clear.

However, when we did this the program came up with the message, ‘Disk Cleaner is set to remove all files in a category which always contains files that should not be removed - this is extremely dangerous!'. Two questions spring to mind: ‘Why did the program offer to delete them all, then?' and ‘Why doesn't the program tell me which of the 15-plus categories contains the files that shouldn't be removed? Not very user-friendly.

New elements to the suite include an active monitor for key aspects of a PC, checking things like disk usage and virus status, and popping up alerts if things deteriorate. System optimiser can re-jig your system for specific uses, such as gaming, multimedia or office tasks. Finally, there's a secure file shredder, so you can be sure deleted files are really gone.

Fix-It Utilities 8 adds relatively minor new features to what is already a pretty comprehensive set of diagnostic and repair tools. While it does most of what it says on the box, there are places - such as when reclaiming disk space - where it doesn't explain the consequences of your settings thoroughly enough. As with all programs that can make fundamental changes to your PC, our advice is use it with extra caution.