utility programs - Software Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, June, 2000 by David Haskin

Keep your home office humming with these system necessities

MOST OF US LIVE BY OUR COMPUTERS--and run the risk of dying by them, too. We're efficient and productive when our PCs work, but our businesses can grind to a halt when they don't.

This explains the enduring need for utility software. Some products in this broad category prevent, detect, and repair Windows and PC problems and help keep costly downtime to a minimum. Others make a properly working system work better, providing faster access to information on your hard disk or on the Internet.

Each subcategory of the utility market offers enough products to fill a Buyer's Guide. To help you narrow your choices, we sampled a dozen assorted Windows packages that are right at home in the home office.

We started with the basics--utility suites. One of these bundled toolkits should be the first software any PC user buys and installs. These kits include utilities to help you find and fix Windows glitches, stamp out viruses, optimize your hard disk, intercept many (though never all) system crashes, and uninstall no-longer-necessary programs and files.

Since no business can afford to lose information, we also tested two backup solutions. And because home-based workers are increasingly dependent on the Internet, we sampled two utilities that help you find and manage what you need on the Web. Finally, we finished our housekeeping roundup with two programs that help you manage all the files you create, as well as three utilities aimed at technical maintenance and support tasks.

We tested each package on a 400MHz Pentium II PC with 128MB of RAM running Windows 98. Each helped increase our productivity to varying degrees, but a few standouts proved downright vital for keeping our home office up and running.

McAfee Office 2000 Pro

HOC RATING 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Like the other suites here, Network Associates' McAfee Office 2000 Pro includes a multitude of tools for doing everything from repairing hard disks to zapping viruses to recovering accidentally deleted files. However, the McAfee suite also offers the company's PGP Security encryption utility and a full-scale Zip compressed-file manager, both of which make it easier and safer to surf the Web and send and receive e-mail with attachments.

McAfee Office has a unified interface, so you can launch all its utilities from one location. On the other hand, we found it difficult to navigate the myriad icons, windows, and buttons that define each individual utility.

We had no trouble logging on to any of the suite vendors' sites to obtain program and driver updates and new antivirus definitions, though the McAfee.com site displayed several misleading error messages. For instance, one error message told us that there wasn't enough memory to perform an update, but the software went ahead and updated the files anyway.

Despite a few rough edges, McAfee Office 2000 Pro matches its competitors' capabilities and gives home office workers unmatched e-mail security tools, making it the most thorough suite in the group.

[pros] PGP encryption and a Zip file manager

[cons] You'll need a road map to find them

Norton SystemWorks 2000

HOC RATING 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Symantec's flagship suite is a descendant of the venerable DOS file-undeleter and disk-fixer, Norton Utilities, which dates back to the early 1980s. But Norton SystemWorks 2000 has kept well up to date, with automated features not found anywhere else.

SystemWorks' Web-based updating capabilities are completely automatic--after you select the "update" option from the central menu, the program will scan the Symantec site for updates, patches, and definitions, then download and install them. The System Doctor module monitors your system for problems and can automatically launch appropriate utilities to fix them.

Most of the SystemWorks utilities are similar to those found in other suites, and the whole bundle will add a noticeable wait to your system startup time, but the suite earns our highest marks for actually finding and fixing Windows problems consistently and correctly. Its clean interface is also the easiest to learn, navigate, and use. For home-based workers who don't have time to constantly tweak their PCs, Norton SystemWorks 2000 is their best bet.

[pros] Truly automated features

[cons] Slows down your system startup

Ontrack SystemSuite 2000

HOC RATING 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Simple operation and powerful file-management tools are the hallmarks of Ontrack's SystemSuite 2000. As with the other bundles, you launch SystemSuite 2000's utilities from a single interface, but the modules all load in that same window instead of launching in separate windows, reducing screen clutter.

Our favorite parts of SystemSuite proved to be its Zip manager and PowerDesk group of file utilities. One PowerDesk module is a Windows Explorer substitute that lets you view the contents of two drives side by side in a single window, making it easier to copy files between drives. The Toolbar utility creates a supercharged, customizable version of the Windows Taskbar.