Knows more about Windows than Microsoft?!... (Norton System Works 2001)

Name: Cleggy

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Product:	Norton System Works 2001
Date:	29.08.01 (517 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easily Customised, Good upates and upgrades via the web, You can get it for around £40 which is good value

Disadvantages: Free updates only last 12 months -no mention of price after that, System/Resources hit if you run all monitors, etc., It's no panacea

System works is great and finding and (more importantly) fixing errors on your PC. I was having loads of problems with my PC crashing, slowing down, refusing to load windows properly, etc. so I decided to give this a whirl.

I decided to make sure my PC was running in tip-top condition by formatting my hard drive, re-installing Windows and starting again from scratch. After installing Windows 98 SE I loaded up System Works and was amazed to find that it actually reported errors with my registry! Amazing - I had done nothing but install Windows and already my system had errors - fortunately System Works knew what do to and sorted my registry out. Either Norton knows more about Windows than Microsoft, or Norton reports errors that aren't really errors, or Windows 98 just installs itself really badly? Who knows?...

Once installed System Works performs a whole host of system checks - monitors and repairs hard drive errors, checks and fixes registry problems, monitors installation of programs, re-claims wasted disk space by deleting temporary files, protects your recycle bin, completely wipes free disk space, and comes with Norton Anti-Virus to keep your system virus-free.

By default system Works runs a lot of these facilites all the time - contsantly monitoring your PC to report when your hard drive needs defragging (via Norton's superior version - not the Windows version), monitoring your system for viruses, and checking and downloading anti-virus updates.

I'll elaborate on my 3 main advantages and disadvantages:

1. Easily customised: System Works is very easy to use, and very easy to configure just how you need it. Once you have installed your applications it is easy to turn off the CleanSweep monitor, and if you want to monitor all your hard drives (or partitions) you can easily add the checks. This is very easy to do - I have hardly had to refer to the manual at all.

2. Good Updates via the We
b: The Live Update feature allows you to download updates and upgrades free of charge. The Anti-Virus definitions are downloaded automatically in the background, but LiveUpdate allows you to actually get updates for the other applications contained in the package. These are quickly downloaded and installed, although as with most updates you have to re-boot for them to take affect.

3. Decent prices available. Most on-line retailers are knocking this out at about £60 which I thought was a little expensive. However, they had it for £50 in PC-World, and mine was marked up at £40 as the box was crushed at one corner (who needs the box?). QVC often have it on for about £40 but it sells out quickly at that price!

The disdvantages..

1. Not all updates are free. After a year you have to start paying for updates - fair enough I guess but they don't tell you how much they are. I know pricing could change so it may be out of date but they could give an indication of current prices, and likely costs when your 12 months runs out.

2. System/Resources hit if you run all monitors, etc. The standard installation starts a lot of monitors running to keep an eye on your system. I'm not sure if you absolutely have to have them all running all the time. I'd advise you to check what it is monitoring and disable anything you don't really need.

3. It's no panacea. I don't think any software like this could ever be perfect. I still have the odd system crash, and System Works itself has even gone belly up on a few occassions. Still, my system is better than before so it was worth it - just don't expect it to stop every problem.

Overall it is well worth it, especially at £40. My system is now pretty stable with hardly any of my previous problems and crashes. In fact my system is now so stable that I've disabled most of the always-on monitoring and just do a Live Update check and a one-button fu
ll system check every weekend. This last one is a great feature that lets you click one button and System Works goes off and does all its major checks - reporting the number and type of errors - then you click another button to fix them (so I guess they should have really called it two-click checking!).

You can get 30-day free trials of the 3 components to the System Works suite (Anti-Virus, Utilitires, and Clean Sweep) so you can always try before you buy to see for yourself just how many errors it can detect and repair.

Summary: