Norton SystemWorks Premier 2005 review

We all know how frustrating it when your PC develops a persistent error.

On your own, it's almost impossible to find out what's wrong, let alone fix it. You need a set of programs that will act as a PC toolkit, helping you diagnose, fix and prevent any recurring problems.

Symantec's Norton SystemWorks consists of five main programs. The first, and the one most people will know best, is Norton AntiVirus 2005. We tested this program in our December 2004 issue as part of our last antivirus round-up. It fended off all the viruses we exposed it to. The main reason it didn't win an award was because, at £36, it was too expensive. This isn't an issue with SystemWorks, which only costs £41 for all five programs.

If, despite the best efforts of AntiVirus, something does manage to knacker your Windows installation, you'll be glad of Norton Ghost. Using Ghost you can create a compressed image of your hard disk, right down to the last file and system setting. If you save this image to a set of DVDs or an external hard disk you can use it to rescue your system in the event of a total failure of Windows.

The 7GB of data on our 114GB hard disk took about 20 minutes to compress andcopy to an external hard disk. Recovery was easy. We booted from the SystemWorks recovery disc and used it to browse to our images on the external disk, then followed the wizard to restore our system.

Norton Utilities has three main functions - optimising your PC's performance, finding and fixing problems, and system maintenance. The performance optimisation consists entirely of a program called Speed Disk. This allows you to move files around on your disk, placing them either in the faster areas at the beginning of the disk or, for unimportant files, in the slower bits at the end of the disk. We tried this with system and benchmark files, but it didn't make much difference to the speed of our system.

The Find and Fix Problems tab contains three programs. The unErase Wizard scours your hard disk for deleted files then undeletes them. As long as you haven't written over the file you're after it works fine - we used it to recover an earlier version of this review. Disk Doctor and WinDoctor diagnose and fix hard disk and Windows problems respectively.

Norton Goback is like the built-in Windows System Recovery utility on steroids. Once it's installed you can use it to return your PC to the exact configuration it was in a few minutes, hours, days or weeks ago. This is great for recovering from crashes. There's even a test mode that lets you try out new bits of software, then decide you don't want them and return your PC instantly to the state it was in before you installed the offending program.

Norton SystemWorks 2005 contains every tool you could ever need to keep your PC running smoothly, and to fix it when it breaks. Fantastic value for just over forty quid!