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Shield Yourself From Harm

You've been told over and over that you need to guard against viruses and prying eyes--and all four of the suites reviewed here offer some kind of safety and privacy tools. No single program gets our recommendation in this category, but several of the suites have some nice features. For instance, Norton SystemWorks beats all the other suites in virus protection.

Antivirus

Recommended: Symantec's Norton SystemWorks 2001 Professional Edition

Make no mistake about it, a good antivirus program is the most important utility you should own--the one absolute must-have tool. It's so important, in fact, that PC World will be doing a full comparative review of antivirus programs in our next issue, where we will be testing the ability of antivirus programs to find and kill viruses. In this story we look only at the speed of the antivirus modules and how easy they are to use.

The important features of any modern antivirus program (aside from the ability to find viruses) are easy updates, speed of virus scanning, integration into Windows, and e-mail support. Screening e-mail is an especially important capability, since many viruses travel by e-mail these days.

Only two suites, Norton SystemWorks and Ontrack SystemSuite, come with antivirus programs. Of those two, only Norton AntiVirus has true e-mail support. NAV integrates with the major e-mail programs (including Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, and Netscape Messenger) and checks e-mail coming into your computer via the Internet's generic POP3 e-mail standard, aiming to catch viruses before you receive them. This approach also works with other e-mail programs that use the POP3 standard to receive e-mail. Norton AntiVirus, which we found far more stable than the other programs in SystemWorks 2001 Professional, is also available separately for $40.

SystemSuite's VirusScanner, by contrast, scans e-mail attachments only when they are saved to a drive.

Privacy Tools

Recommended: McAfee Utilities 4

Is someone else watching you? Windows keeps details of what you're doing in a number of ways, and it is possible for someone to read these and see what you've been doing on your PC. If you want to protect your privacy, you'll have to regularly wipe out certain files and lists.

All four suites offer tools to purge these files, including the Internet cache and history, and the list of recently used documents. Cookies are small files used by Web sites to identify you. SystemSuite has the best cookie remover, making it easy to select just the cookies you want to delete. SystemSuite has similar tools for clearing out the Internet cache and history.

To keep your data truly private, you have to encrypt it. McAfee Utilities is the clear winner here: It comes with PGP, widely regarded as one of the best encryption programs around, with easy-to-set-up tools for encrypting files, folders, and e-mail on the fly.

The only other suite that includes encryption is SystemSuite, as part of PowerDesk 4 Pro. But PowerDesk's encryption is nowhere near as easy to use as PGP--if you use your encrypted files frequently, you'll be tempted to keep them open to everyone. PowerDesk also lacks PGP's easy e-mail integration.

All four suites let you destroy a file so that it cannot be recovered after deletion--they overwrite the area of the disk where the file was stored. You can read more about these and other products to protect your privacy in our "Fortress PC" story in the May issue.

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