McAfee Office 2000

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 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.