System Fixers - Worth the Money?

CyberMedia Uninstaller 4
Registry Management for Windows 95 and NT Users

As Macintosh users are so fond of pointing out, Microsoft Windows isn’t always an easy system to maintain. When it’s all working the way it’s supposed to, Windows is great, but when something goes awry…yikes.

And despite the advances Microsoft has made in its Windows 98 and NT 4.0 operating systems, the potential for problems is always lurking. If you’ve ever accidentally deleted the wrong file, you know what we’re talking about.

Thus, there are a number of products whose sole raison d’être is to help keep Windows shipshape.

We're not a big fan of products that promise easy solutions to complex problems. However, of the lot, we’re most impressed with CyberMedia Uninstaller 4 as a product that most gracefully walks the line between "helpful" and "unobtrusive." It accomplishes tasks that are difficult or impossible to do without it, such as moving an application to another drive. Easy on a Mac; very tough on a PC running Windows 95 or NT 4, thanks to their reliance on the database of system keys known as the Registry.

With Uninstaller 4, you can move, archive or delete applications at will, Registry entries and all.

Another function in the "easier said than done" department is deleting old Windows 3.x or Windows for Workgroups files and DLLs. Those users who upgraded their systems from an older OS undoubtedly have more than a few unneeded files lurking in the Windows directory. Similarly, Internet users invariably have directories containing previously cached web pages and graphics files. Uninstaller ferrets them out and cleans things up.

It can also optionally remove old Windows 3.x files from a system that has been configured to "dual boot" – which many users elected to do as a "safety buffer" when they first upgraded to Windows 95. After you’ve determined that all your apps are indeed compatible with the new system, this is the fast track method of deleting those obsolete system files. Or, you can tell Uninstaller how many megabytes of free disk space you need and it will collect items that are safe to delete, in order to allow you to reach that goal.

To help you decide which files aren’t important, it color-codes files you haven’t accessed or updated in over days as green. Files that have been accessed but not modified in 90 days are tagged as yellow, and those files accessed and modified recently are displayed in red. Thus, it is easy to see, at a glance, which files can be safely moved, archived or deleted to free up space on your system’s hard disk. When you delete a file, the system archives it so that it can be safely restored in the event of a problem, then updates its database to reflect your changes. Thus, the software keeps track of the changes you make, making foul-ups unlikely.

An interesting aspect of Uninstaller is its Application Mover function, which performs exactly the same function as the similarly named feature in Power Quest’s Partition Magic 3.0 software. This is not coincidental – Power Quest licensed the software for inclusion in its highly regarded disk partitioning package. Indeed, Uninstaller is an ideal tool for those users who purchase a second hard drive and want to move some of their applications from the old drive to the new one. A related function allows you to move applications to a completely different PC. It can even make the resulting "transport archive" self-extracting, so that Uninstaller doesn’t need to be present on the other system. We’ll leave some of the possible uses for that bit to your imagination.

Caveats: If you are installing UnInstaller on a computer running the Windows NT 4.0 operating system, you must have Service Pack 1 (or newer) for NT installed.

CyberMedia Uninstaller was previously marketed as MicroHelp Uninstaller.

Product: Norton Utilities 3.0
From: Symantec
Price: about $100
Pros: Automatic updates, disk repair and other "fix-it" tools.
Cons: Occasionally intrusive interface. Slows down computer -- a lot. CrashGuard causes crashing problems on some systems.

Live Update Pro
Software bugs are as much as part of computers as the chips and circuits that apparently act as their breeding grounds. To address this harsh reality, software makers such as Symantec, Microsoft, Cybermedia, McAfee and others have developed software titles that check your system or software versions (and/or, in some cases the current date) to determine if you should upgrade software components. Indeed, Microsoft built this feature into its Internet Explorer 4.0 browser and is touting a similar feature for other system components as one of the benefits of Windows 98.

Symantec supplies a similar feature for Norton Utilities, which it calls Live Update Pro. For example, if you bought Norton Utilities the very first day it was released, you might have stumbled across one of several now widely discussed bugs in that version. If, however, you used LiveUpdate to check (via the Internet) for an update, you would have noticed that, as of mid-January 1998, that a free update was available. Live Update simply retrieves it, installs it and painlessly upgrades you. (Windows 98 has a similar capability.) If only all aspects of computers worked this way!

Think your system's Registry is clean? Betcha it isn't. WinDoctor is a component in NU3 that detects and fixes errors in the Win95 Registry.

Although NU3 is getting mostly "Thumbs up" from users and works under both Win95 and Win98, there are a few issues to be aware of. Symantec has a patch on its website that fixes a Speed Disk problem, and there's a new technical support section under "files and downloads" devoted to NU3.0 and Win 98.

See ZDNet reader comments for more on Norton SystemWorks

Product: Norton CrashGuard Deluxe
From: Symantec
Summary: System-resident utility logs crashes and attempts (usually unsuccessfully) to unfreeze crashed applications.
The trouble with these utilities is that we use them to try and resolve a situation that is usually doomed anyway. Norton CrashGuard for Windows 95 supposedly unfreezes 16- and 32-bit Windows applications that have "hung." Great, except that CrashGuard warns you "Danger! The system might become unstable if you do this." Unsticking an application might allow you to save data once in a while, but ultimately, it is not addressing the real source of why the apps are crashing in the first place. It didn't save us any data or solve any useful problems during the three crashes it logged but failed to fix during our tests. We did, however, find that it incorrectly saw our idle FrontPage web server as a frozen application. And we did encounter a blue screen of death message ("system is busy") at one point anyway. Worse, it seems that CrashGuard caused our system to crash more than it had before! We removed CrashGuard and our system became stable again. HmmMMM...  Not recommended, unless you don't mind paying money for dubious benefits.

Speaking of dubious benefits...

Product: Nuts&Bolts98
From: MacAfee (a division of Network Associates)
Pros: more tools than Norton. Y2K checking and fixing functions, disk utilities, system checkers, antivirus tools, useless animated icons and fancy visual enhancements... you name it -- they're here.
Cons: System crashed more often after installing the so-called "Bomb Guard." Some "fix!" After running the Registry Cleaner and restarting, our system bombed with a dreaded "blue screen of death."

I really want to recommend one of these products... really I do. But apparently, I haven't seen the best one yet. This one has the best features, but, like Norton, it actually decreased the reliability of both of the test systems we tried it on. Additionally, its intrusive habit of changing the background on all the windows in the system to an annoying moiré pattern made us think our monitor was on the fritz until we figured out how to turn it off. Because this product has such a great feature set, we decided we'd fiddle with it a little more, to see if we could find an element to turn off, in order to return our system to its previous -- un-Bomb Guarded -- level of stability. But we experienced many crashes and freezes -- especially when working with removable PC cards on our portable test PC -- trying to get the program to work. Bombs away!

But what we found, after an extended period with an updated (10/22/98) version of this program on a desktop computer, were so many serious flaws, we feel it is truthful to say that installing this program wrecked our desktop test system. Our system locked up frequently after installing it, trashed our registry, crashed with mysterious blue screen errors periodically, and when we tried to uninstall the program, wouldn't uninstall (we had installed it to a directory other than the default; the uninstaller apparently forgot this) properly. Even Windows' Safe Mode locked up!  Arrgghh!  Thumbs WAY down on this one.

Interestingly, on both of our test systems, uninstalling Nuts&Bolts98 immediately returned the system to normal stability and functionality. As a final insult, though, we found that Nuts&Bolts left 34 megabytes of inactive files on our system after the uninstallation process had (apparently) completed.

Q: Is there an alternative to reformatting a hard drive (or partition) if the OS becomes corrupted?

A: Yes. Reinstall the OS to a different directory and reinstall your apps. Then, delete the old OS directory.

Q: I know it is possible to reinstall the OS in a different directory, but is there a way to avoid  having to re install all the programs?

A: Sometimes. When you reinstall and OS such as Windows 95, 98 or NT into a new directory, it will eliminate problems related to your previous Windows installation, but there will be none of your previously installed programs shown  on the desktop or in Start - Programs. However, they are still on your drive(s). While we will start by recommending that you reinstall all your apps for best (and easiest) results." there is an alternative that can sometimes be faster, albeit not necessarily better.

• Locate the shortcuts in the old Start Menu from the previous installation. Alternately, locate the executable files directly on your drive(s). Run the first one.
• Make note of any error messages -- typically, a dialog complaining that it cannot find a certain DLL, OCX or INI file. Write down that missing file name.
• Search for that name using the Find Files command. Copy to the same location in your new NT directory.
• Cross your fingers and re-run the EXE. If another error message appears for a different DLL, repeat until it runs.
• Some apps, such as Microsoft Office, can't be easily fooled into working this way and be aware that some advanced features like OLE are not going to work when the registry is not updated properly. But I've done this trick a dozen times or more over the years, and 90% of my apps work fine without reinstalling.