Disk housekeeping utilities group test review
Drive management software
Review date: 30 July, 2004. Review by: Simon Williams
SystemWorks really does do the works. As well as Ghost, covered elsewhere in this group test, the suite includes Norton Anti-Virus, Utilities, Password Manager, GoBack and CleanSweep, as well as WebTools and numerous other little helpers.
Some of these utilities are self-explanatory, with Norton Anti-Virus, for example, being one of the best-known forms of protection against unwanted visitors from the Internet. Automatically updated from the Symantec site for one year, this product costs half the purchase price of the suite on its own.
Norton Utilities is the second major player in the suite and divides down into seven different utilities. These include System Doctor, which monitors your PC for problems, Speed Disk, which improves hard drive performance by reorganising the data on the disk, and Disk Doctor, which analyses its file structure and partition tables.
Judicious use of all these applets can improve the sweet running of your PC, although if you install all the active performance monitors, you'll notice a reduction in performance due to the diagnostics themselves.
Password Manager is of particular use for those who spend a lot of time online, as it encrypts all the passwords you keep for sites, e-mail and software access, while still leaving them accessible to you. It reduces the chance of identity theft with the minimum of fuss.
A couple of the utilities are not as useful as they used to be, because Microsoft has improved the way Windows handles the issues they address. Norton GoBack serves much the same purpose as Windows XP's System Restore, for example, and CleanSweep removes installed applications in a similar way to Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel.
But even if you only use half the utilities on offer in SystemWorks 2004 Professional, it still represents good value for money.
Company: Acronis
Contact: 01727 799670
Company: Ontrack
Contact: 0800 243 996
Company: Symantec
Contact: 01628 592 222
Company: Symantec
Contact: 01628 592 222
Company: Symantec
Contact: 01628 592 222
Company: V Communications
Contact: 01752 895100
Company: Acronis
Contact: 01727 799670
