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Secure Your System

Besides their disk- and system-related utilities, all four suites offer at least some of the weapons you need to protect your computer from bad guys on the Internet. In addition to stopping viruses, all of the packages can wipe away the histories of your browsing habits and other personal data.

System Mechanic has the best selection of security tools. It comes with Panda Antivirus Platinum, which also works as a firewall and as a spyware finder and remover; in our recent antivirus tests, however, Panda was the least effective at capture and removal of viruses. Meanwhile, SystemSuite offers a firewall as well, and SystemWorks can handle spyware (through the included Norton AntiVirus 2004), but only System Mechanic blocks pop-up ads.

Norton SystemWorks offers a password manager--the only significant addition to last year's model--that encrypts passwords and other data to keep it all safe from prying eyes. SystemSuite comes bundled with the MailWasher spam filter and the GhostSurf anonymous-browsing tool, but these are limited in functionality, and MailWasher has a truly irritating nag screen. You have to pay $20 more for the full, nonannoying version.

A Scan A Day Keeps Misery Away

Periodic medical checkups can help keep you healthy, and the same goes for your computer. You should regularly scan Windows and your hard drive for errors or problems that could get worse over time and could possibly lead to system failure. And when Windows isn't working well, you need an easy way to pin down the problem and fix it.

All four suites simplify the most basic maintenance tasks with an all-in-one checkup. Typically, this scans and defragments your drive, runs some diagnostics, deletes garbage files, scans for viruses, and erases your Internet tracks. It's a good idea to run this checkup weekly. All the suites also let you launch individual modules, and both SystemWorks' and System Mechanic's are easy to schedule for automatic launch. SystemSuite's scheduler supports the individual tasks but not the all-in-one checkup.

Every suite except Ultra WinCleaner has a defragger (see "Defraggers: No Longer Needed?"). SystemWorks and SystemSuite both have disk scanners that check for errors, and SystemSuite's offers something significant that Windows lacks: a removable-media scanner that can identify errors on your CDs and DVDs. It successfully spots problems but offers no solutions; Mitja Perko's free CDCheck, by comparison, will try to recover the damaged files.

SystemSuite's Fix-It component provides an extensive set of hardware diagnostics, more than any of the other suites here. It tests your PC's memory, motherboard, drives, and (with a set of loopback plugs that that you can buy for about $20) ports. The graphics and multimedia tests can, if you're in the mood, even do double duty as a psychedelic light show.

SystemSuite also has one cool tool for determining where all the free space on your hard drive has gone: a graphic view of all of your folders that shows you how much space they (and any subfolders) actually take. SystemWorks does something similar, but it shows you only the size of one folder at a time.

Windows diagnostics: You're more likely to suffer from a lack of system resources or an overloaded hard drive than from failing hardware components. To protect you from such everyday problems, both SystemWorks and SystemSuite include background Windows diagnostics programs that monitor your computer as you work, giving you much more information and warning than does Windows' own Task Manager. But a program running in the background, monitoring everything, is almost certain to have a bad effect on your system's performance. Indeed, with past versions of both suites users often complained that these programs slowed down systems and caused them to crash.

Start-up program controllers: Lots of applications invite themselves to load at start-up, and uninviting them can be tricky. Both Ultra WinCleaner and System Mechanic can help you choose which apps automatically run when Windows boots. Though Windows' own Msconfig does the same, the suites offer a significant improvement: profiles. You can save different sets of programs for different uses; for example, you could have one profile that loads several applications for general use and one that loads nothing for diagnostic purposes. System Mechanic's Startup Manager is by far the easier to use, while Ultra WinCleaner's WinStart Commander tends to make simple chores needlessly complicated.