Sarasota PC Monitor
Ontrack System Suite 3.0
A Software Review
by Herb Goldstein
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.Look...up on the screen....it's a bird...it's a plane....no, it's supersuite! And, if ever there was a super-suite, Ontrack's System Suite 3 certainly fits the bill.
Our loyal readers know well that the king of utility software publishers is Ontrack. With a background of more than 25 years in hard drive installation, recovery and management utility publishing, they have more recently become the undisputed leaders of general PC utility software, blowing the former notables right out of the water. Their most recent contribution, System Suite 3 adds some nuances and is now fully compatible with Windows ME, as well as 2000, NT, 95 and 98.
The king pin of the suite is Ontrack's Fix-It Utilities. It is also available as a stand-alone program sold separately. It is designed to find, fix and prevent a broad range of problems on, as well as tune-up your PC. It's your best insurance problem to keep your computer running optimally, efficiently and saving yourself considerable headaches, down time, and repair bills.
The first module in Fix-It Utilities is the FixWizard, the easy way to maintain and fix your system without worrying about the details. It can scan for viruses and hard drive errors, check and fix Year 2000 readiness issues, defragments your hard drives, clean and fix the system registry, find and fix broken or unused files, and fix broken registry entries. I have had my Windows 95 Pentium 100 system for nearly three years, and in that time my registry had many broken items that I was not aware of. When I ran the Wizard, it found and fixed 123 broken links in my registry. I have no idea where they came from, but they are no longer a problem.
The FixWizard performs its operations in a "safe" manner, meaning that it will fix or remove only those items or files that will not interfere with other normal operations. The remaining five modules in Fix-It Utilities 2000 are more powerful, and expand and amplify operations on your computer hardware, system, applications and data. Because they are more powerful, they need a little more oversight on your part. Therefore, when they find errors they describe the error and give you the choice of removing, repairing, compressing or leaving them alone.
The Disk and Files module checks and repairs the hard disk, checks the partition and boot records, checks the files for directory structure, valid dates and times, proper file names and lost clusters. It performs many of the functions that Windows ScanDisk performs, but does it faster and more completely. It defrags the hard disk, and recovers disk space by finding files that are unnecessary, duplicate or unused for some time, allowing you the choice each time whether to remove them, or to zip them and move them to another part of the drive. It can make a copy of all your critical system files and any other files you wish to backup, and restore them when and if your system becomes corrupted. Finally, it checks individual disks or CDs to make sure that they can be read without errors.
The system registry is a critical set of files that Windows needs to be able to run. With use the registry can become fragmented, become corrupt or contain invalid links. All these errors interfere with proper operation of your applications. The System Registry module finds these errors, describes them, and with your approval attempts to repair them, or to replace them with previously backed-up copies. It cleans out unwanted or unnecessary items in the registry and edits and optimizes the registry to increase speed. And it can customize Windows by changing the way it looks and works.
The System Diagnostics module checks your installed hardware for any problems, and gives you a complete report on how your computer's hardware is working. It covers system memory, hard drives, floppy and CD-ROM drives, serial and parallel ports, video, keyboard, mouse, modem, sound card, multimedia capabilities and system motherboard and central processing unit. Since my computer has one of the earliest Pentium processors, without MMX capability, I wondered whether the test would pick this up. Sure enough, everything else came out fine, but my multimedia capability showed up as deficient. The System Diagnostics module also finds and fixes Year 2000 problems, explores and describes in detail information about your system, and monitors your system resources, warning you when they are getting low.
The System Protection module includes CrashProof, an application that runs in the background. This app intercepts and interrupts system crashes, describes them, allows you to save your data, and then attempts to fix the problem. The module also contains an excellent virus scanner and repair program, which can be either run full- time in the background (Real Time Virus Scanner), run on demand or scheduled to run at preselected times. This module can also preschedule system Fix-It maintenance tasks, prepare the System Rescue Disk set, view a log of all Fix-It Utilities operations on your system, and allows you to undo any changes made by Fix-It Utilities.
The final module is called the Crisis Center, and this is where you go if your computer has real trouble. It will help you rescue and recover your data, and if possible isolate and repair the cause of the problem. It offers first free technical support and information, to help you recover from data loss problems. At extra cost you can have Ontrack's professional data recovery engineer attempt to diagnose and repair severe data loss corruption via modem and Internet connection. Finally, for the toughest data recovery service they offer an In-Lab service.
Several new features and some improved have been added to 3.0. Easy Recovery Professional Lite is a new data recovery software tool that will bring back 50 files at a time, even if the system won't boot, and saves files to a safe location.
Jet Defrag is an improved version of their defragmenting/optimizing utility. It includes IntelliCluster technology that arranges the data on your drive for quicker access to your most frequently used software.
SMARTDefender is a new early warning system that alerts users to hard drive problems, allowing you to save data before drive failure.
A new multimedia tutorial guides you through use of all the tools contained in the suite.
Bootable Rescue CD- The suite CD can be used as an emergency rescue disk that will help you restore a system that won't boot-up, allowing you to save data and restore corrupted system files. A floppy rescue disk is also included.
Improved Diagnostics- You can use a broad range of tools to troubleshoot your computer hardware. It now additionally tests your USB port and DVD drive.
Power Desk 4 Pro- Here's the handiest and my most frequently used part of the suite. It's Windows Explorer on steroids! Perform a wide range of functions on your files and folders presented in a superb format with a wide range of useful functions you won't find in Explorer. This module alone is worth the cost of the suite, and is available as a stand-alone program.
Data Eraser Professional Edition- Allows safe recycling of your hard drive by permanently erasing all the data contained thereon.
Easy Uninstall monitors your software installations so that you may remove all traces from whatever remote corners of your drive when you want to uninstall a program.
The antivirus scanner portion of the suite is non other than our favorite PC-Cillin that will do a super job keeping you virus free. All in all Ontrack's System Suite 3 is a classic program that belongs on everyone's computer. It has our whole-hearted and enthusiastic recommendation. At a street price of $50, I can't think of a better investment you can make in your computer. You should have 64 MB of RAM or better and 60 MB of free drive space for a complete installation.
www.ontrack.com. (800) 872-2599. :
Copyright 2001. This article is from the February 2001 issue of the Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL 34277-1889. Permission to reprint is granted only to other non-profit computer user groups, provided proper credit is given to the author and our publication. We would appreciate receiving a copy of the publication the reprint appears in, please send to above address, Attn: Editor. For further information about our group, email: admin@spcug.org/ Web: http://www.spcug.org/
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