Product Reviews

McAfee Office 2000  [PC Pro]
COMPANY: Network Associates	PRICE: £42  (£50 inc VAT)
RATING:	ISSUE: 63  DATE: Feb 00

Earlier this year we saw a battle brewing between Symantec and Network Associates as to which could provide the best bundle of PC utilities. Symantec won the first round - although its Norton SystemWorks (reviewed issue 53, p201) was more expensive at £89, it provided a sophisticated package of utilities that all had a useful purpose on your PC. McAfee Office (reviewed issue 54, p192) looked more like a jumble sale of utilities thrown together with no real thought of integration.

McAfee Office 2000 goes some way to remedying this, with far smoother integration between the various utilities. The most obvious immediate change is that the entire suite can now be loaded in one session. However, if you're running an earlier version of McAfee Office, you'll be disappointed to know that every individual program must be uninstalled first. You can also say goodbye to a hefty 144Mb of hard disk space for the entire suite - rather ironic considering one of the main functions of this program is to free up resources.

The jewel in the Office 2000 crown is McAfee VirusScan - still one of the best anti-virus products on the market. Real-time scanning is dealt with by the VShield background utility, which keeps a close eye on files that are created, renamed, modified, copied or executed and will block access to suspect files. VShield also checks all Internet downloads, along with ActiveX controls and Java applets, and you can block access to specific Web sites. Email attachments get the same treatment and you can specify the types of attachments you want checked.

VirusScan looks after on-demand scanning and it can also be run directly from the First Aid 2000 interface. It had no problems spotting all 52 of our test viruses, although it was unable to repair 14 of them. This isn't a failing on McAfee's part, as some file viruses cause so much damage during infection that it's far safer to replace them with a clean copy from your last backup. A welcome bonus is that Network Associates includes free virus signature updates for the life of the product.

Oil Change aims to reduce the amount of time spent browsing the Internet as it scans your system hardware and software, checks the Oil Change Web site and displays a list of patches, upgrades and new drivers for you to download and install. On our test system this only took around four minutes over an ISDN link. Bear in mind that you only get the first year's subscription included in the price though.

The Y2K Survival Kit has limited value with the millennium looming ever closer - even if it does find any major problems, you won't have much time left to fix them. It runs a range of tests on the BIOS, CMOS, real-time clock, DOS and Windows, and follows this with a comprehensive software scan. It then advises you of any problems found and possible cures. Its application database has been updated to include over 5,000 products with known Y2K compliance issues. It also analyses spreadsheets and you can specify the range of cells it should check to reduce the scan time. Our test PC (a 266MHz Pentium II) had 410 spreadsheets, which took 35 minutes to check through.

Nuts & Bolts is the main diagnostic and repair tool, although there aren't many new features

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added since the original release of Office. It organises the various functions under four main headings, with Repair and Recover looking after backup and repair of critical hard disk areas and rescue disk creation. Previously, you'd have had two rescue disks to look after - one created by VirusScan and the other from Nuts & Bolts - but only one disk is used now. However, SystemWorks still wins here, as it also supports a floppy/Zip or Jaz disk combo for booting back into Windows.

Discover Pro provides in-depth information about system hardware and resources. Benchmarks are also provided but are now looking dated - the processor test still compares its results to those of a 486/33, a 486/100 and a 100MHz Pentium.

Under the Clean and Optimise heading you'll find a CleanUp Wizard that scans the hard disk for rarely used files and displays them for deletion. If removed they'll be backed up in a compressed ZIP file first. Another Wizard looks after your Windows Registry by scanning, repairing and re-organising the structure for improved performance, while WinGauge Pro gives you a visual read-out on system status. This updated version had trouble with our test system, as it was convinced the processor was always running at around 90 per cent utilisation. McAfee Office 2000 does load a whole raft of background tasks, but the Windows System Monitor showed that utilisation never went above 20 per cent during idle times.

Windows protection duties are now handled by Guardian. This monitors memory usage to protect it from being accidentally overwritten and also intercepts program failures. A Reactivate button is added to the Close Program window so you can attempt to restart a hung program and save your work before closing it down.

First Aid 2000 is offered as an alternative diagnostics tool to users who feel that Nuts & Bolts is too complex. It runs a complete hardware and software health check on your PC and, if it spots any problems, it loads an Advisor that guides you through the troubleshooting process.

In answer to Norton's CleanSweep, McAfee supplies UnInstaller. This monitors program installations and keeps a log of all files loaded so applications can be cleaned out when removed. This is the latest version with more tools to help keep your hard disk free of unwanted rubbish, but it still falls behind CleanSweep in terms of ease of use.

Anyone who's already familiar with McAfee Office will note the lack of Guard Dog and PGP encryption software. These are still available if you choose to wait for the Pro edition of this suite, which is due to be released early in the new year. The idea of Guard Dog is to protect any sensitive data on your PC while you browse the Internet, and it also gives you extra control over cookies. As its description suggests, the PGP encryption software allows you to securely encode files, which can then only be read by fellow PGP-owners, and only then if you encrypted the file using your fellow owner's key.

Although these utilities are useful, their extraction has made McAfee Office 2000 leaner and more streamlined. Installation is far slicker and the whole suite can now be updated via the Internet in a one-button operation. The duplication that was rife in previous versions has been remedied, but the fact that McAfee Office loads so many background tasks - 15 in our case - somewhat defeats its aim of improving performance.

There's no doubt that you're getting an awful lot for your money, and for many people McAfee's virus scanning software will be worth the buying price on its own. Nevertheless, and despite the all-round improvements, Norton SystemWorks retains its edge for overall quality, and if you're serious about squeezing the most power and efficiency out of your system it's worth the extra initial outlay.

By Dave Mitchell