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Once upon a time (when PCs first got hard drives), people needed to be able to recover accidentally deleted files--so they bought programs like Norton Utilities. They also needed to scan their drives for errors and defragment their files. Today anyone can retrieve files from Windows' Recycling Bin, and the operating system has its own disk maintenance tools; increasingly, the features that used to require a separate program are being included in Windows. But companies continue to produce utilities, claiming that they are faster or better than the ones built into Windows.

It's a fact of modern life that computers have problems. Installing a new program can trash your operating system, and without regular maintenance the files on your hard drive can get so mixed up that they get strewn across it, slowing down saving and reading data.

A good suite of utilities can diagnose and fix the conflicts and flaws in your system, maintain the health of your hard drive, and help you organize your files. Ineffective utilities can waste your time, and bad utilities can leave your computer in worse condition than before you installed them.

To test the claims of utility suite vendors, we looked at four suites, each offering a somewhat different collection of tools: Iolo's System Mechanic 3.6, McAfee Utilities 4, Ontrack's SystemSuite 3, and Symantec's Norton SystemWorks 2001 Professional Edition. We skipped a fifth package, Ultra WinCleaner Utility Suite, because the new version wasn't ready in time for our review (it is scheduled for release in September). Since you may need functions that the utility suites don't offer, we also looked at a selection of stand-alone utilities, including Smith Micro's CheckIt Utilities, PowerQuest's PartitionMagic, and Vcom's DriveWorks.

We put the suites and the stand-alone programs through five common tasks: diagnosing and fixing what's wrong with your PC, taking care of your disks, managing your files, backing up your Windows environment, and protecting you and your system from external threats such as computer viruses. We recommend at least one package for most tasks, and when Windows' own built-in utility is the best choice, we note that as well.

Our conclusions are based on in-depth testing carried out by the PC World Test Center and our experience using the programs on a variety of PCs.

Of the four major packages, Ontrack's $50 SystemSuite turned out to be the best choice in most categories, was easy to use, and proved reliable.

McAfee Utilities has more modest ambitions--most obviously, it lacks an antivirus program (McAfee sells McAfee VirusScan separately for $30). On the other hand, McAfee Utilities costs only about $30 and includes many of the features that most users will need.

The name Norton has been synonymous with utilities for nearly two decades, so at first glance, Symantec's Norton SystemWorks 2001 Professional Edition should be the leading program. SystemWorks 2001 Professional's collection of tools would seem to be worth its $80 street price (Symantec also sells a version without the partition backup and fax components at a street price of $55).

But features aren't everything. Many of the Norton programs proved unreliable, with crashes and other odd behavior; you can read more about one person's experiences in "When Utilities Attack." And some of the features of SystemWorks 2001--such as Registry Tracker and Norton Diagnostics--can't be used under Windows 2000.

Iolo's System Mechanic is even more modest than McAfee, lacking not only an antivirus utility but also disk-care and system file backup features. Unfortunately, the $60 System Mechanic also lacks McAfee's modest price.

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