I purchased System Works 2000 primarily for the troubleshooting and defragmenting tools for my Win 98 system. I have used Norton Utils on the macintosh for many many years and have come to trust them to save my butt when I did something stupid or a random lunar phase corruped a hard drive.

Installation
Installation went very smooth, with most of the default options working for my situation.

First Run
After installation, you must reboot your computer. After rebooting, you get a really cool dash board that shows the status of your system in the lower right corner of the screen. You are able to display defragmentation levels on all of your partitions, the used space on each of your drives, the amount of memory being used and the status of your processor. There are also stop lights that reflect your system health as far as Disk health, registry problems and the like. All is very well laid out.

Right away System Works' Win Doctor gave me a red light saying "Windows Problems Detected." I ran Win Doctor and let it fix my system. This is where the problems began. Immediately after "fixing" my system. Things began to crash regularly. Especially explorer. Crash guard was of no help usually it would get locked up itself and require a restart to get control of my system.

I tried everything in order to get control of my system back. I re-ran Win Doctor. It claimed my system was fine. I re-installed Win 98 over my old Win 98 and still had frequent random crashes. Prior to installing System Works, my machine was fairly stable. Now it was crashing at least once an hour. So I hung my head low and decided to uninstall system works.

Un-install
Doing an uninstall was a big mistake! About 75% through the uninstall script the uninstaller crashed with a memory access error. I rebooted and fond my system hanging as it tried to start a 3/4 removed system works. Booting into safe mode, I removed all remnants that I could find of the program. Rebooted again and found that at least the system would start. It was still very unstable though and would crash even if you looked at it wrong.

In order to correct my problems I had to do a clean install of Win 98. While not the worst thing on earth, it does come a close second. For a program that is supposed to make your system more stable and faster, this is a pretty sad tail.

I cannot say it loud enough...Avoid this program. The only good thing I can say is Symantec was very nice in giving me my money back. They must be used to it or something.

My System.
I was asked in a comment to list my system specs and I think that is a great idea. The box is a 700 Mhz Athlon system with a FIC SD 11 motherboard. The system has 256 MB of RAM and a Diamond Viper II video board.



Recommended: No