Norton SystemWorks 2001 is a suite of all the popular Norton products required to keep your system in good shape. These include the 2001 versions of Norton AntiVirus, CleanSweep, Utilities, Ghost, and WinFax Basic. Since these products themselves don’t need any introduction, we’ll talk about the new features they offer as part of SystemWorks.

SystemWorks is simple to use as it has one interface from where you can access all Norton applications. It offers you three options for installation. One is a ‘typical’ installation where SystemWorks installs the standard set of programs and tries to balance between right protection and utilization of system resources. Another option is ‘express’ where it installs the product with the most commonly-used settings. Finally, the ‘complete’ installation option installs everything.

The 2001 version of Norton AntiVirus can scan your incoming e-mail for viruses before you open them. If you have multiple accounts, it will display them for you to choose from. It also gives you an overall system status on viruses, which includes letting you know if real-time protection is enabled and if the system virus scan has been run fully. Other options include scheduling scans and generating reports.

Norton Utilities includes Speed Disk for defragmenting your hard drive, Disk Doctor for diagnosing and repairing your hard drives, System Doctor to continuously monitor your system, and finally WinDoctor that checks for Windows problems on your system. It also has the UnErase Wizard to help you retrieve deleted files from your system.

Norton CleanSweep can be used for cleaning up your PC of any unwanted applications or data, and Internet clutter like ActiveX controls, cookies, plug-ins and the Internet cache. You can compress infrequently used applications or move existing applications to another system, and find and clean up duplicate, orphan, and redundant files.

SystemWorks has support for Windows Me and Windows 2000. Unfortunately, Norton CrashGuard, which was available in the earlier version, has vanished from this one. Finally, the LiveUpdate feature lets you know when to connect to the Internet and update the products in SystemWorks. At Rs 4,350, Norton SystemWorks is worth its price.

Ankur Saxena at PCQ Labs