Product Reviews

The battle for the best utility suite on the market has been swinging Symantec's way for some time. McAfee has finally given up and dropped its Office product range, while Ontrack dumped its SystemSuite (see Reviews, issue 90, p148) in October this year by selling it to V Communications, where it now looks in danger of sinking without trace.

One of Symantec's main strengths is that rather than offering a set of poorly integrated, highly duplicated and frequently redundant software toys, it's instead consistently delivered the most useful collection of diagnostic, clean-up and anti-virus tools. SystemWorks 2003 continues this tradition and, although it doesn't see any major improvements, it does feature the latest versions of the core components.

Even so, existing users won't see anything to get excited about. Apart from the expected spring clean, the main interface is almost identical to SystemWorks 2002 and offers easy access to each component. Norton Utilities provides the troubleshooting tools and offers a single optimisation option that re-organises your hard disk for speedier access. Norton Disk Doctor and WinDoctor provide system and operating diagnostics tools, but many features of utilities such as the Optimisation Wizard,

Norton CleanSweep 2003 has little competition in the uninstaller market, but again no new features are in evidence. It provides a wide range of options for tidying hard disks and cleaning out Internet clutter. It also has the ability to uninstall, back up and restore apps. The application transport feature has been removed, although this was of limited use as it only worked correctly with small- to medium-sized programs.

Roxio's GoBack Personal Edition was introduced in SystemWorks 2002 and provides system roll-back tools, which allow you to recover your system to a specific point in time in the event of a failure or error. This shouldn't be confused with a backup utility, as it doesn't copy data to another location. It maintains a history log by monitoring hard disk activity and creating safe points or snapshots that can be used to return the system to an earlier point in time. If you want to create a separate GoBack drive or restore a single file, you'll have to upgrade to the Deluxe Edition.

Web Tools is largely redundant - it duplicates most of the Internet housekeeping features of CleanSweep, and the Connection Keep Alive utility won't cut any ice with the increasing number of ADSL users. The jewel in the SystemWorks crown is definitely Norton AntiVirus 2003 (see Reviews, issue 98, p166).

Clearly, Symantec now has little, if any, serious competition in this marketplace, although it's beginning to look as if the utility suite has had its day. Processors are so fast, there's plenty of spare horsepower, memory is dirt cheap, hard disks are large enough to get away with sloppy housekeeping, and Windows 2000 and XP users get a number of system clean-up and optimisation tools as standard. Buy Norton AntiVirus 2003 and forget the rest.