Norton SystemWorks 2001

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