Product Reviews

The battle for the biggest and best utilities suite has traditionally been fought between Symantec and McAfee. SystemWorks 2000 Professional (reviewed issue 64, p202) and McAfee Office 2000 Pro (reviewed p196) offer a huge collection of tools to help keep your PC in tip-top condition, but both have one very big weakness: they only support Windows 95 and 98, with Windows 2000 support not expected until later this year. This leaves SystemSuite 2000 in the enviable position of currently being the only utilities suite that supports all Windows platforms.

Formerly going under the banner of Fix-It Utilities, the suite was acquired from Mijenix Corporation at the end of 1999 by data recovery specialist Ontrack. Although not as well endowed as the market leaders, the ace up its sleeve has always been support for FAT, FAT32 and NTFS, making the jump to Windows 2000 much easier.

Installation on our Windows 2000 Professional test system was simple enough, with SystemSuite only using around 35Mb of hard disk space - a huge improvement on the greed shown by McAfee Office and SystemWorks. A single interface keeps all of the various utilities grouped together for easy access. However, there's a fair amount of work to do after installation as SystemSuite doesn't load any background tasks by default, so tools such as real-time virus scanning and crash protection need to be enabled afterwards.

If you purchased SystemSuite specifically to recover a sick system, you can use the supplied Rescue Disk, but this only works with Windows 95 and 98. NTFS users won't find any solace and the manual is particularly unhelpful. A System LifeLine feature is designed to interrupt the NT boot process and provide a command line prompt, but this failed to work with Windows 2000, and Ontrack advised that an upgrade is in the pipeline.

Fix Wizard is the first stop at the SystemSuite repair shop as it runs a complete diagnostics check on your system, which includes a virus scan, Registry clean-up and a scan of the hard disk. All these tasks can be accessed separately so you can carry out disk repair, verification or take a snapshot of critical data such as the boot sector. Windows 2000 comes with a high-quality disk defragmenter, but DefragPlus goes

ADVERTISEMENT

one step further as it teams up with IntelliCluster. This analyses program usage and the relevant files are optimally arranged on the hard disk during defragmentation for quicker access.

SystemSuite's on-demand virus scanner proved to be up to the job as it detected all 52 of our genuine test viruses. It did fail to repair ten files, but many viruses cause so much damage during infection that it's safer to reinstate them from the last clean backup. The on-demand scanner offers a range of options so you can run a quick check on memory and boot sector, or run a deeper scan that will peer inside compressed files. Real-time scanning is also available but SystemSuite's utility pales into insignificance when compared with McAfee's VShield, which can scan inserted floppy disks at shutdown, check ActiveX controls and Java applets, block access to specific Web sites and even scan email attachments.

The Registry can be repaired and optimised, while Easy Uninstall removes programs and associated files, takes backup copies or moves applications to another area or hard disk. It can also monitor installations, but this is another option not currently available for Windows NT 4 or 2000. WinCustomizer lets you change Windows settings and logos to give it that personal look, and the bundled copy of PowerDesk Utilities takes customisation a step further. PCDiagnostics runs a barrage of hardware tests, and a floating monitor panel keeps you in touch with system performance and available resources. You also get a Y2K-compliance test but this proved to be yet another feature that doesn't currently support Windows 2000, as it advised me that my system wasn't compliant because it didn't have IE 4.01 or the NT Service Pack 4 installed.

Ontrack's Crisis Centre offers a unique set of services for retrieving lost data. A basic recovery tool with ten uses allowed will analyse your hard disk and attempt to recover data, but the full version costs extra. A remote data-recovery service is available over a modem or Internet link with an Ontrack engineer and, when you're in dire straits, Ontrack can take a dead hard disk, dismantle it in a Class 100 clean room and retrieve the data. Both of the latter services are available at an agreed fee.

If you're only interested in a Windows 95 or 98 system suite, I'd still recommend choosing between Symantec's SystemWorks 2000 Professional or McAfee Office 2000 Pro, depending on whether your needs are orientated to system backup or Internet security. Nevertheless, SystemSuite has plenty of tools to keep your system in good health and free of clutter, and is the best suite currently available for looking after your Windows 2000 system. However, Ontrack expects at least two future upgrades before Windows 2000 is fully supported, by which time the other suites may well have caught up.