Norton SystemWorks

Considering the popularity of Norton software products, Symantec probably has almost as large an installed base of users as Microsoft. Norton Utilities alone has for many years been a favourite of serious users looking to keep their PCs in tip-top shape, while Norton AntiVirus provides one of the highest levels of protection against infection. In fact, every Norton product has a useful place on today's PCs, although you'll need to dig deep to buy them all individually. SystemWorks remedies this problem by packaging all the current Norton products in one box for around half the price. For a mere £89 you get five of the best with Norton Utilities 3, AntiVirus 5, Uninstall Deluxe, CrashGuard 3 and Web Services. You should note, however, that SystemWorks is only available for Windows 95 and 98.

Installation is straightforward and offers a number of options to the user. You canæselect individual components, choose the typical version with all the main ingredients or go for the complete option, which adds a few extra utilities. Unfortunately, the latter choice will lose you a whopping 115Mb of disk space - rather amusing considering one of the main tasks of SystemWorks is to free up resources. There's no real integration between the separate products either, although a SystemWorks menu providesæeasy access to each one.

Norton Utilities

Norton Utilities is the main reason why SystemWorks has limited operating system support, since it only works with Windows 95 and 98. System Doctor is the most prominent feature. It provides a user-definable floating toolbar of graphs, charts and speedometers which show system performance and available resources. The system is scanned at regular intervals and you can decide how often readings are taken for each individual graph. It even keeps a record of events, so you can view a history of activity. System Doctor works hand in hand with WinDoctor, which pops up and advises whenever a problem is encountered. Scans are run on the Registry, the installed hardware and on the software and it can automatically fix errors.

If your PC feels sluggish, the Optimisation Wizard can help by checking your Registry, swapping file settings and customising them to suit. Speed Disk also comes to the rescue, as it will physically move frequently used files and applications to the beginning of your hard disk for improved load times. Run times will depend on the size and condition of your hard disk. Speed Disk took nearly 30 minutes to optimise the 1.5Gb hard disk on my Windows 98 test system.

The System Information section provides tabbed folders for accessing and viewingæeach resource. The Internet tab, for example, will show details such as the Dial-Up Networking history and WinSock module versions, although I was none too pleased to see it showing the last successful log-on details with my ISP username and password revealed for all to see.

Before you start playing with SystemWorks it would be advisable to make a rescue disk set. This contains critical information, such as CMOS data and hard disk partition information and can be invaluable in the event of a major system crash. The system will be booted into DOS mode where you can recover accidentally deleted files, repair disk errors and even unformat disks, provided that the Quick Format option was originally used. You can also get a poorly system back into Windows 95 or 98 using a rescue set combination of bootable floppy and Zip disk. I found boot time was around nine minutes using a parallel port Zip drive, and system response was horribly slow.