Labs

From the best known name in PC utilities, this sounds like a comprehensive solution. And that's sort of true. If we took all the bad points of the other programs on test and rolled them into one, the result would be something like this.

This utility ran in the background for no particularly useful reason, eating up system resources - ironic

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for a program designed to speed up your PC - and wasn't very easy to use. It's similar in focus to Fix-it Utilities, but with fewer tools and no anti-virus or spyware scanner. The main 'Protection Center' serves to provide vague information about the sort of software you should be running to prevent infections, with links to the Symantec website, from which you can buy this software.

We were unable to test the full effectiveness of the 'one click' system optimisation tool, because after an hour it still hadn't completed. It did, however, find eight problems with our Registry, and helpfully reported that it was unable to fix any of them. We were frustrated that SystemWorks couldn't be fully closed down from the system tray, so when it crashed it couldn't easily be restarted.

Overall, we found this program used more than its fair share of our modest test PC's system resources, and was therefore counter-productive.