Product Reviews

Rather like a car, your computer requires the occasional tune-up to keep it running smoothly and in peak condition. Rather than having to take your PC in for a service, though, you can buy software, such as Symantec's Norton SystemWorks 2006, that does the job automatically.

SystemWorks is actually a suite of tools that are monitored and controlled through a single application. Each tool takes care of a different part of your system.

Norton AntiVirus is one of the best-known anti-virus products on the market, and the 2006 edition provides scheduled scans of your hard disk, as well as real-time protection from new threats. Detection levels are quite high, but we found that performing a full scan on our test computer brought it to a grinding halt, using almost 90 per cent of the processor's time. It also makes opening office documents very slow, as the scanner springs into action. You don't have to install Norton AntiVirus, though, so you can stick with your existing virus protection if you prefer.

SystemWorks 2006 really comes into its own with its other tools. Norton Utilities has been around for a very long time, but it's as good as ever. Norton Disk Doctor in particular is head and shoulders above Windows' ScanDisk. It's more thorough and detects

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and fixes problems that ScanDisk simply gives up on. Win Doctor does a similar job for the Registry and Windows shortcuts to help keep your PC running without any glitches.

Norton System Doctor, however, is rather less useful. Its job is to monitor your computer and flag up warnings when it reaches given thresholds, such as when space is running low on the hard disk. Windows has similar tools built in, and Symantec's have no real advantage over these.

Norton GoBack is a little like Window's SystemRestore, but it keeps track of more file information, so you can recover lost files as well. You can even start it before Windows loads, so you can roll back to a previous state if your computer won't start properly.

Finally, Norton Cleanup scans your PC for unwanted cookies, history entries, cache and temporary files, which proliferate on your computer when you browse the web. At least, that's the theory. The first time Cleanup ran automatically on our test PC it deleted all our history, cookies and cache information, all of which we wanted to keep. It even deleted our saved logon details for an Egg Money Manager account. You can choose which data to keep for each site in the configuration, but this is obviously of little use once it has already run.

Norton SystemWorks ties all these applications together. This utility warns you when it's due to run a system scan, and lets you see your PC's current level of protection at a glance. It's pretty easy to use, and having access to all these applications in one place is a good thing.

While Norton System Doctor is excellent, the software is marred by the slow anti-virus application and the lengthy uninstallation routine, which took a couple of hours on our PC. A slightly cheaper version without Norton AntiVirus and Cleanup would make this a much more attractive purchase.