Symantec's Norton SystemWorks 2001 Professional Edition

Having the right tools at hand when you're doing maintenance jobs can save a lot of hassle and aggravation - ever tried tuning up an overhead-cam engine without a proper plug wrench? It can be done, but it ain't fun. When it comes to maintenance to keep Windows-based PCs humming along happily or drastic fixes when things go wrong, Symantec's Norton SystemWorks 2001 is a handy thing to have in your software toolbox.

Norton SystemWorks 2001 is a handful to review, because it is an extensive collection of tools for Windows 95/98/Millennium Edition and Windows NT machines. The suite comes with "2001" editions of Norton AntiVirus, Norton Utilities, Cleansweep and Norton Web Services. I looked at the Professional Edition, which has all these features plus Norton Ghost and WinFax Basic Edition for a suggested price of $150.

To begin with, one of the biggest improvements in Norton Utilities 2001 over its predecessor is the fact that something has been left out. Crashguard was a program that loaded at startup in previous versions of the suite to guard against system crashes and help you salvage your work if anything did go wrong. It was notoriously buggy, and I found it caused more crashes and system instability than it solved. Symantec has mercifully dropped it from Norton Utilities 2001, and good riddance.

Now for what the suite does have.

First of all, there's the feature no PC should be without in this on-line age - anti-virus protection. Norton AntiVirus has a scanner to check whether the PC has been infected, and software to undo the damage done by many malicious viruses. It also has a series of small programs that can be set up to load automatically when the PC boots up, protecting the system from being infected in the first place if virus-laden programs are run, infected e-mail is opened, etc. The Norton AntiVirus control panel has been cleaned up and streamlined, and is much more user-friendly than the one in the previous version of the suite.

The 2001 suite comes with a subscription for a year's worth of virus updates from the Symantec Web site. It can be renewed annually for about $5.

Norton Cleansweep is an electronic broom for your system. It cleans up the litter of Internet files, cookies, plug-ins and cached files that build up in every PC over time, eating up space and slowing performance. The system cleanup options include a wizard for removing programs (far more thorough than the Windows uninstall option), as well as a "fast and safe" cleanup wizard that searches for common sources of useless PC file clutter. You can archive, back up or move files and programs to other folders and drives, as well as set them up for easy transport to another system.

One of the most powerful Cleansweep tools is the registry sweep, which cleans up the old entries that often get left behind in the registry when programs are deleted. For advanced users, there are also "finders" for duplicate files, redundant DLLs, and unused and orphan files.

All the options have an undo/restore option that compresses and archives files for a few days before completely vaporizing them, just in case you change your mind about the things you've removed.

The most useful part of the suite for the average user is probably Norton Utilities, which has a number of simple tools for optimizing a PC's performance. The Norton Utilities part of the package is worth the price of the suite alone. It's an essential collection of tools for both the novice and the system-savvy user. All of the features can be run with a mouse click or two, but there are also more complex options for people who want to roll up their sleeves and really poke about under the system's hood.

Speed disk is a more powerful version of the Windows disk defragmenter, with extensive options for setting up the way files are organized on the hard drive if you really want to get down to nitty-gritty performance tweaking. The optimization wizard automatically reorganizes files to speed up the boot-up and program-launching processes.

In the category of "Find/Fix problems," there is a system doctor to look for common problems with drives and system files. Unerase wizard can recover files that have been deleted accidentally, and the WinDoctor program that gives the operating system a quick two-minute physical and automatically fixes any problems it finds.

The Norton Utilities registry manager has tools for manually editing the registry (only for experts, since mistakes here can have nasty consequences for your system/), as well as a tracking system that keeps a tally of changes made to the registry in case you need to do some troubleshooting. Other system maintenance tools include a program to permanently wipe information from your hard disk so nobody can ever recover it, and a variety of ways to gather system details ranging from memory to CPU to sound cards, and also run diagnostics and performance tests on these components.

If you're short on disk space or don't want to install all the memory-resident features of Norton Utilities 2001, or if you are troubleshooting a number of PCs, you can run some of the basic scans and fixes from the CD-ROM. The drawback is that you do not get any undo options if things get fouled up, and there is no log of what changes have been made to the system by the software.

Norton Web Services is a link to Symantec partners who offer on-line services for your PC, such as Xdrive and Expertcity. It's also a quick way to evaluate your PC and determine whether new drivers are available for any of your system components or peripherals.

The add-ons in the 2001 Professional suite are Norton Ghost 2001 and WinFax Basic Edition. WinFax is a strange add-on for a utility package, since it is communications software, but some may find it useful if they didn't get fax software with their modem. The real jewel, though, is Norton Ghost.

Ghost is for doing copies or "clones" of your hard disks. It creates a mirror image of a hard drive's contents on another drive so that you can quickly duplicate one PC's files and configuration to another machine, or store a complete backup in case of disk or system problems. It's an extremely useful package - it takes me about an hour to back up or restore my system from CD-R discs, but I could do either process in minutes when moving a 1GB-plus image between hard disks with Ghost.

The software worked flawlessly, but Ghost also has some limitations. It has a Windows interface for browsing directories of disk images that you've created, but the program itself can't be run from Windows. Instead, you have to create special boot disks and run the program from a command-prompt interface in DOS. This is a clumsy way of doing things and the menus are not very user-friendly, which may scare off novice users.

The SystemWorks 2001 suite has a new menu tying all the features together from one easy screen. It is well laid-out and easy to understand, and puts all the features in one place so they're easy to find. Symantec has also added a new one-button-checkup feature as part of the main menu screen. It checks for major faults with the Windows registry, program files, the hard disks, desktop shortcuts, and so on. It's a fast and easy way to solve basic system problems and improve performance.

Symantec's SystemWorks 2001 has a few minor annoyances, but overall it's a much faster, easier and efficient package than SystemWorks 2000. Other than Ghost, it gets top marks for user-friendliness. It also offers a wealth of diagnostic, troubleshooting and performance-tweaking tools that will please both the everyday user and the Windows expert, covering a lot of the gaps and shortcomings of the Windows family of operating systems. It's a useful program on a day-to-day basis to keep a PC humming along smoothly, but if problems strike, it's indispensable.