Norton SystemWorks 2000 Professional Edition

CrashGuard 2000 is a background task that monitors memory usage and intercepts program crashes by preventing allocated memory from being overwritten. An extra AntiFreeze button is added to the Close Program window that can be used to restart a hung program or close it gracefully to avoid data loss.

Web Services is Symantec's answer to McAfee Oil Change and can reduce time spent Internet browsing by checking for upgrades, patches and new drivers on Symantec's Web site and offering to download and install them. But the list returned for our test PC consisted almost entirely of Microsoft updates along with a pile of shareware toys. Also, you only get six months subscription included in the price and will be charged around £2 per month to continue with Web Services.

As with McAfee's Y2K Toolkit, Norton 2000 will have limited use with the millennium on the horizon. By the time you read this review, you're likely to already know whether your systems and software passed safely into the New Year or burnt up on re-entry. In fact, the rollover to 1 January is only one of a number of dates that need checking, and Norton 2000 runs a complete scan to ensure your system can handle them all. It offers to run LiveUpdate to check Symantec's Web site for Year 2000 specific updates, and scans resident applications and data files for compliance. It picked up on a number of dubious spreadsheets on our test system and impressively listed the co-ordinates of cells containing two-digit years.

For disk cloning, Norton Ghost is a useful tool. If, for example, you want to transport all your data and applications from one PC to another, you can copy a bit-for-bit image of your original hard disk across to the new system instead of reinstalling everything. Ghost also supports removable media such as Jaz and Zip, so you can create images off your hard disk for backup purposes.

As it requires exclusive access to the hard disk, Ghost is best run from the DOS prompt. Source and target hard disks can be on different systems as parallel ports and network links are both supported, but a parallel cable isn't included and you'll need to be familiar with the NetBIOS network protocol, as this must be loaded manually.

Ghost must be loaded on both PCs if you're cloning across separate systems. The main interface is simple to use which is fortunate as Symantec provides only minimal help for this utility. A parallel connection will test your patience - we found it took almost four hours to clone a 1Gb partition. Local cloning is quicker as it took us only 15 minutes to create an image of the same hard disk on a Jaz drive. Having used Ghost for over two years now, we consider it an invaluable tool. Admittedly, we do have a specific purpose for it as we use it to create images on Jaz disks of fresh Windows 95 or 98, Windows NT and Novell NetWare installations for specific systems that can be loaded in a fraction of the time it would take to install them.

Serious users will find Norton SystemWorks 2000 Professional Edition an invaluable utility tool for monitoring and maintaining their PC but, at £90, it's comparatively expensive. However, it does offer a lot more than the McAfee equivalent as Office 2000 Pro only adds the Guard Dog Internet security and PGP encryption tools whereas, along with Norton 2000, SystemWorks includes Ghost - a utility that could prove useful for technical support staff.

Author: Dave Mitchell