One Sweet Utility Suite

Given the increasingly complex interactions between PC hardware and Microsoft's Windows operating systems, it's not surprising that comprehensive utility suites are hot sellers. Such suites offer a means to diagnose and prevent problems with your PC, and can even help you recover when disaster strikes. McAfee Office 2000 and Symantec's Norton SystemWorks 2000 are the 500-pound gorillas of utility suites, but Ontrack Systems has a worthy and viable challenger in Ontrack SystemSuite 2000. At $60, SystemSuite 2000 is priced comparably to its major competitors, but it offers some unique and useful features, for a wide range of users, that the McAfee and Norton suites lack. And SystemSuite 2000 really shines in assembling a whole that's greater than the sum of its various utility parts.

SystemSuite 2000 is composed of utilities developed by Mijenix, a company Ontrack acquired last year, which has turned out solid, powerful tools over the years. Together, the utilities offer an easier and deeper means of maintaining your PC's integrity than do the built-in system maintenance utilities provided by the various versions of Microsoft Windows.

Putting the Pieces Together

SystemSuite 2000 doesn't offer lots of new features; rather, the suite's focus is on application integration. The suite takes the formerly stand-alone Fix-It Utilities, Easy Uninstall, ZipMagic, and VirusScanner--a total of 56 individual utility functions--and puts them together into a unified package with a common interface. Also included with the suite, though not integrated into the interface, is Mijenix's powerful alternative to Windows Explorer, PowerDesk Utilities. You even get one-click access to Internet updates for the entire suite. It all amounts to an outstanding integration job: You never get the feeling--as you do with McAfee's suite--that you're working with a bunch of disparate utilities.

The suite's installation process is very conservative about making changes to your PC--a refreshing departure from most system suites. Instead of doing everything by default, SystemSuite 2000's installation routine suggests that you install only the components of the suite that you need to protect yourself, such as CrashProof (for crash protection), IntelliCluster (an intelligent disk defragmentation app that places your most-used programs where they can be accessed most quickly), and Disk SnapShot (which backs up system data). It then gives you the option to install other components as you so choose.

To help bail you out when disaster strikes, the software suggests you create a full set of rescue disks, consisting of backups of your critical system files; the rescue disks go beyond the basic Emergency Rescue Disk that comes with SystemSuite 2000. The package also suggests that you run System Saver, which saves a copy of the Registry and system data to a safe part of your hard drive, an area that, typically, is rarely touched during normal computing operations.