Cover Story: Tools for Trouble-Free Computing

Maintaining a computer is much like maintaining a marriage--healthy ones require both regular attention and occasional extra effort. Neglect either your spouse's or your PC's needs, and you risk having to get along by yourself.

Utilities--applications that maintain and repair your system--help your PC run better and more dependably. Patience, love, and an open mind, among other things, make your marriage run smoothly, but few people want marital advice from a computer magazine, so we'll stick with what we know.

We tested 22 utilities and grouped them according to task: programs designed for setting up a new or updated system; apps for diagnostics, repair, and cleanup; and several more that you might--or should--run regularly, such as defragmenters.

At the end of this article, we also look at how the two major utility suites--Symantec's Norton SystemWorks 2002 and Ontrack's SystemSuite 4 Utilities--measure up as overall packages and how their components compare to stand-alone applications (McAfee, whose suite we reviewed last year, is phasing out its McAfee Utilities product). But this article isn't about suites exclusively; you can easily maintain a healthy computer without either of these. (We'll discuss security utilities, such as antivirus software and firewalls, in our July issue.)

Another package chock-full of helpful utilities debuted last year--it's called Windows XP. (Throughout this roundup, we treat Microsoft's latest operating system as a new utility suite, though some of its tools appear in earlier versions of Windows, too.) In some cases, the tools built into Windows XP performed better than the retail software we reviewed for this article.