Review: Avanquest System Suite 9 Professional
Ian Waugh casts a beady eye over Avanquest's new System Suite 9 Professional
| Product | System Suite 9 Professional |
|---|---|
| Company | Avanquest |
| Web | Save $20 on SystemSuite Professional 9 - .
|
| Price | $59.99/£39.99 |
| We like | Very comprehensive, easy to use, effective |
| We don't like | A few fillers, only 3 licenses |
| Rating | 9/10 |
| Requirements | Windows XP/Vista |
As sure as there are death and taxes, there are also several sub-species of individual and low-life criminals who will try to attack your computer, control it, take over your life and steal your savings. So you need protection and, unfortunately, Windows itself is not really up to the job.
Avanquest's latest release, System Suite 9 Professional, integrates most of the features you need, not only to keep your computer and data safe, but also to optimize its performance, diagnose and repair problems, too.
It's available as a download or a CD. It has an unbelievably comprehensive 438-page User Guide which is useful if you need to delve into any particular aspect of the program. However, most users will probably be happy to scan through the Getting Started Guide and click through the program's options.
Quick fix
For easy, quick fixes, there are five One-Click Solution buttons - Comprehensive, CleanUp, Protect, FixUp and Optimize. Comprehensive combines the other functions will do just about everything you need so you can start with that and explore the other options at your leisure.
Protect, as you might expect, checks for viruses and malware such as spyware and adware. It also checks for and quarantines tracking cookies.
FixUp diagnoses hardware problems and fixes invalid registry entries. It uses SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting technology) to check the health of your hard drive (obviously, your drive and system must support this although most moderns systems do), partition tables, boot records and so on, to make sure it's in good order.
Optimize optimizes your PC's performance. You can select one of four profiles depending on how you want to use your computer. They are Office, Security, Multimedia and Games.
Most functions have more comprehensive and tweakable settings. The Anti Virus page has various scan options, a quarantine manager, and Allowed and Blocked lists. The NetDefense Firewall can show you which applications are running. The Firewall pops up an alert when a program tries to access the internet and you can give or deny it permission.
More options
The Maintenance section has six options - Diagnose, Fix & Maintain, Optimize, Cleanup, Recovery and Zip. Many expand on the options available in the One Button section and let you run specific functions rather than global ones.
For example, under Diagnose there's an ErrorTracker where you can track and view Windows error messages, plus a MediaVerifier to make sure removable media can be read without errors.
Optimize has a very comprehensive Startup Commander to optimize the files that load at boot-up.
In the Recovery sections there are options to recover deleted files, create a bootable rescue CD and create Checkpoints. These are similar to Windows' System Restore feature but arguably easier to use.
Some functions seem like fillers such as WindowsUpdate which opens the Windows Update window, ClockSync, and Zip which, although it makes it easy to create Zips, it doesn't have a multiple zip extraction function. It actually takes longer and is more cumbersome than simply right-clicking on a file and selecting Extract All.
But to complain is churlish. The program has dozens of useful functions.
A pack comes with three installations which you will gripe about if you have more than three PCs but three will be enough for many households.
Conclusion
When you're looking at PC security, you have a lot of options. System Suite 9 Professional does a great job. Not only does it secure your PC, it can also improve its performance, and diagnose and repair problems. It's comprehensive and easy to use. You can download a demo of Avanquest System Suite 9 here,
