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RSS feedsPoor old Windows. It tries its hardest to meet all our needs but there are certain areas when, as a standalone operating system, it sorely lacks the wherewithal to cope. To protect yourself against viruses, crashes, lost data, frozen screens and the like it's imperative to make sure that you are kitted out with a little extra software to lend a helping hand.
Utility software is there to plug the gaps in Windows, and you'll find quite a wealth of products, each with its own particular area of expertise. Some will make sure that your system ticks over smoothly or speed things along a little, while others will remove nasty leftovers from uninstalled applications and free valuable disk space.
Other utilities will allow you to optimise your Windows or internet experience and enable you to customise features to your own requirements.
Although things such as optimising your hard disk might sound complicated, most of today's utility tools employ an incredibly simple and straightforward approach and some even have wizards to guide you through the process of keeping your PC in tip-top shape.
While some of the products here are commercially available, many of them can be found on the web as shareware products on a try-before-you-buy basis and some are even free. There's one thing for sure, however - once you start using utility software you'll never look back.
We've rounded up 20 top utilities and divided them into five distinct categories. Read on to find out more about diagnostic and system tools, graphics utilities and Windows enhancements (in Part 1) and internet utilities and file compression and management tools (in Part 2).
Norton Utilities 2000
If you've ever suspected that your PC isn't running at top speed or you've started getting the odd irritating error message, then perhaps you could do with a little help to work out what's going wrong.
Norton Utilities 2000 is a set of very easy-to-use problem-solving and fixing tools that can help you to diagnose both hardware and software glitches, either by performing a manual check-up or by letting the software run silently in the background to monitor your PC 100 per cent of the time.
As well as Norton Diagnostics, Utilities 2000 comes with CrashGuard, which helps to alleviate the stress of your PC crashing by allowing you to sneak back into your applications and save your work. Meanwhile, the SpeedDisk utility can help your system to run as fast as possible by rearranging and fine-tuning the way that files are stored on your hard disk.
Norton Utilities has a simple user interface that allows both inexperienced and expert users alike to optimise your system and keep it ticking over nicely.
Price £46 (including VAT)
Supplier Symantec 020 7616 5600
PartitionMagic 5.0
Partitioning a hard disk has never been the sexiest of activities and has traditionally involved working in DOS, something that many people want to avoid. Still, there are a number of benefits to be had from doing a little bit of partitioning, such as increasing hard disk efficiency by eliminating wasted clusters and providing the option of more organised program and data storage.
Thankfully, PartitionMagic 5.0 works in Windows with a friendly interface that allows you total control when managing your hard disk(s) and any partitions. It has several wizards to hold your hand as you create, resize or merge partitions. You can even preview the effects of your desired changes before you commit to actually putting them into practice.
The program comes with BootMagic, to help you to safely install more than one operating system on the same PC, allowing you to choose the OS you want to run on bootup. PartitionMagic can also help you move programs from one drive to another, and can convert your hard disk between a wide number of different file systems.
Price: £59 (including VAT)
Supplier: Powerquest 01189 450200
Ontrack SystemSuite 2000
We've split up our top 20 into several different categories, but there are some packages designed as utility suites to take care of several different areas at the same time. One of the most comprehensive is Ontrack's SystemSuite 2000. It includes versions of ZipMagic and PowerDesk, featured elsewhere in this roundup, along with a multitude of other useful tools.
VirusScanner 2000 keeps nasty bugs at bay, while Fix-It Utilities 2000 takes care of the day-to-day upkeep of your system with tools for diagnosing and fixing disk problems, Registry conflicts in Windows, and hardware troubles.
CrashProof 2000 protects your data from the inevitable crash or two, and EasyUninstall 2000 cleans unwanted files from your hard disk and ensures that when you uninstall a program it doesn't leave behind any mischievous detritus.
SystemSuite 2000 is entirely integrated, so that you have access to all of the tools at the same time. And you can schedule the program to perform automatic maintenance so that you won't even notice it happening.
Price £55 (including VAT)
Supplier Ontrack UK 01372 741999
McAfee VirusScan 5
The 'I Love You' virus. which hit the world's email inboxes in early 2000, highlighted the importance of having virus protection installed on your PC. McAfee VirusScan 5 provides that kind of security, checking pretty much any imaginable source of infection.
Its email X-Ray feature will automatically scan the contents of any attachment sent to you and inform you of suspicious entities lurking within before you have even opened your new mail.
VirusScan will also take care of any miscreants hidden within ActiveX and Java applets that may have inadvertently been downloaded from the internet as well as hunting down those good, old-fashioned macro viruses that can play merry havoc with your Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.
You can even use VirusScan to quarantine an infected file in a 'safe zone' on your hard disk so that you can repair it without having to worry about it infecting other valuable files on your hard disk.
VirusScan is easy to use and can be updated to tackle new strains by downloading new cures from the McAfee website at the click of a button.
Price £25 (including VAT)
Supplier Network Associates 01753 827500
MicroAngelo 5.0
The way that their PC looks is almost as important to some people as the speed or health of a system is to others. Desktop wallpaper is, of course, the place to start. But even with this, you'll still be left with the poor selection of icons and cursors provided with Windows.
So, why not use your artistic talents to personalise and brighten up your display? Luckily, there are a number of applications to help you with the task.
Of all the icon editors currently out there, MicroAngelo has to be one of the best. The Studio is where you are likely to spend most of your time, creating your very own icons and cursors that you can then import into Windows and use on your desktop.
It works in a very familiar way and has many of the features that you'd expect from a full-blown image editor, let alone an icon editor. You work with individual pixels and literally join the dots and do the colouring-in. There are extensive colour palettes and there's even a preview mode to give you an idea of what your icon will look like when reduced to its natural size.
Price $60, shareware
Supplier Download from impactsoft.com
Paint Shop Pro
Windows has an image-editing program called Paint tucked away in the Accessories menu, but this was never intended for heavy-duty work. With the internet and digital photography becoming ever more a part of day-to-day PC use, a decent graphics package is something that no respectable computer owner should be without.
Paint Shop Pro began life as a shareware download but has since moved from strength to strength. It's a great image editor, and has a clean, easy-to-use interface. You can use it to view graphics files of many different types and convert them into other formats, such as Gifs and Jpegs, for use on a website. It also has a great screen capture facility.
Version 7.0 was released in late 2000. This boasts even more features, such as improved vector graphics tools and an Effects Browser that allows you to preview the way that filters will affect your images.
You can give Paint Shop Pro a road test by downloading the trial version from the website before you buy.
Price £94 (including VAT)
Supplier Digital Workshop 01295 258335
QuickView Plus
A version of QuickView is incorporated into Windows. Basically, it allows you to open and view files of different types, regardless of whether or not you actually have the application they were created in. QuickView Plus is an extended version of this that includes a much wider selection of filters to let you peek at more than 200 different file types.
So, if you use Microsoft Excel as your spreadsheet program, you will still be able to open and view files that have been created using Lotus 1-2-3. And QuickView Plus is particularly useful for opening graphics that have been saved as obscure file types.
The full application can help you with your file management. You can 'pin' the QuickView Plus window to a pane of Windows Explorer to get a preview of your file - this means you don't have to open every document or graphic file if you are searching for something specific.
QuickView Plus is not currently available as a standalone consumer product in the UK, but is still available for purchase from the US Jasc website.
Price $49, downloadable only
Supplier Jasc website
Acrobat Reader
The web is full of useful stuff to download. And it's not just software, games and images - a lot of useful documentation is posted online. This is usually distributed using files in Adobe's Portable Document File (PDF) format, though alternative formats are becoming available.
Ever lost a manual for some computer hardware and find that you need to go back and have a look at something? Well, it's highly likely that you'll find it on the manufacturer's website as a PDF. You'll just have to make sure that you have the right software in order to view it.
PDF files are usually created in a program called Adobe Acrobat. This is pretty expensive and is not recommended for those who just want to view documents in that specific format. Instead, Adobe provides a freeware application known as Acrobat Reader, available from the Adobe website and actually included on many CDRoms, including ours, so the chances are you may well already have a copy tucked away somewhere.
Acrobat Reader will allow you to view, search and zoom in and out of PDF documents, but not edit them.
Price Freeware
Supplier Download from the Adobe website
PowerDesk Pro 4.0
If you've never really got on with the way that Windows Explorer works and hark back to the heady days of the File Manager that came with Windows 3.1, then PowerDesk Pro might well be the answer for you.
Essentially, PowerDesk is built around the same sort of format as Windows Explorer, but incorporates many of the types of utilities mentioned in this article. For starters, there's a third pane to the Explorer window. This uses the QuickView feature to display (if it can) a preview image of the file that you are currently highlighting, making it much easier to search through content for elusive files and documents.
The professional version of the utility contains additional filters for viewing many other file types along with a built-in archiving program that allows you to compress or unzip archive files. There are even tools for converting graphics files and encrypting data.
PowerDesk Pro is an extensive collection of invaluable tools that are integrated into a very simple interface, but perhaps should have been part of Windows in the first place.
Price £14 (including VAT)
Supplier Ontrack UK 01372 741999
Tweak UI
A popular utility first discovered as freeware hidden away on the Windows 95 CD, TweakUI is still in existence for the Windows 98 generation, although it has disappeared from the CD of Windows 98 Second Edition due to compatibility issues with Internet Explorer 5.0. It can, however, still be found on the web.
TweakUI allows you to have a bash at customising Windows itself (the UI stands for user interface). A series of tabs along the top of the TweakUI dialogue box allow you to change the settings for the way in which your mouse operates, improve Windows' security, modify your Desktop and icons, manually remove applications from your Add/Remove Programs list and much more.
TweakUI is all about altering the finer points of Windows so that it looks and works more to your own liking. You can even alter the amount of time that the Windows splash screen is displayed at bootup.
Price Freeware (find it in the PowerToys directory on Windows 95 and 98 CDRom)
Note Windows 98 Second Edition users can download it from websites including: www.generation.net/~hleboeuf/w98util.htm
Adaptec Goback
How many times have you installed a program and wished you could turn back time to a moment before you ever had? Some applications can cause untold damage to a system; sometimes programs don't agree with your setup and start to cause a headache with numerous error messages and uninstalling the program simply doesn't seem to return things to normal.
GoBack sits between Windows and your hard disk and makes sure that you never need worry about such things again. It tracks all the data stored on your hard disk and, in the event of disaster, allows you to zap back to a time before software errors, virus attacks, deleted files and system crashes ever happened.
Although not exactly an alternative to backing up your data, GoBack can help provide peace of mind and can even make repairs should you discover that you can't start Windows.
In fact, GoBack is so successful that Microsoft has seen fit to build something very similar into Windows Millennium Edition. Users of other Windows versions should head straight towards this Adaptec software.
Price £50 (including VAT)
Supplier Adaptec 01276 854500
TurboNote Plus
Is your computer monitor forever covered in sticky notes to remind you of impending birthdays, appointments and phone numbers? Apart from being environmentally unsound, these can be scruffy and have a tendency to lose their stick, drop off and disappear just at the moment you need them most.
TurboNote + is a great little utility that works in exactly the same way as ordinary Post-its but as an onscreen tool rather than relying on paper and semi-adhesive glue. You can annotate a document to remind you of something or whack a note straight onto your Desktop so that you don't forget it.
The latest version of this shareware program also features the ability to 'mail' a TurboNote to a friend or colleague's Desktop and has a search facility, so that you can look for keywords such as 'John's phone number' across all the notes that you might have tucked away or backed up on your system. And you can customise the way that your notes look, so that they don't always have to be that ghastly shade of yellow.
Price £20 shareware
Supplier Download from the TurboNote website
Click here for Part 2.
All Desktop Computers
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