System Mechanic 6 Professional

Pros: very good anti-viral and anti-hacker software

Cons: needs proper documentation

Summary: I have been a loyal user of Norton System Works and their Internet Security (NIS) since they first appeared but in their current incarnations they seem way too slow, of questionable reliability, and just plane dated. As an experiment I've been using both Norton and System Mechanic Pro 6 (includes Kaspersky antivirus software and a proactive anti-hacker suite with functionality essentially like NIS; port blocking and restriction of application online access) separately on three different machines at home and in my experience System Mechanic Pro has been much preferable to Norton. First, each machine has only ONE manufacturer's suite running so there is NO competition between suites. Second, when switching from one manufacturer to another all of the first's components are completely uninstalled and any residual 'Program Files' from the second are deleted so that each new install is relatively fresh. Now a typical problem I've had with Norton, even with auto updates enabled, is that it can miss an .msi worm which results in the infamous 'Norton Antivirus does not support the function, uninstall and reinstall' during boot-up ... which means uninstall, reinstall, and update NIS. This past weekend one machine picked up an .msi trojan but the NIS reinstall didn't correct the reboot problem. And who wants to keep the startup services Windows Installer disabled to bypass the problem? SOOO ... with Mechanic reinstalled there, all preliminary scans and updates and optimizations run (these show up on SysMecha's home message window, ETC: allow 2hrs), I retraced my steps and Kaspersky's antivirus deflected the worm somewhere between PriceGrabber and TigerDirect.com (aside: click on the 'don't show again during current session' when warning pop-up appears). All things considered, SysMechaPro6 does the job reasonably well here since WinXP is used as just an applications appliance and we dual boot into SuSE LINUX for any real programming needs. One old caveat: the Junk File Removal tool can be too enthusiastic (also of minimal utility). It managed to delete an obscure JAVA file in Matlab 7, which had to be tracked down and replaced. I plan on using System Mechanic 6 Pro as the XP 'overlord' on the two new AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ that will be built in late August (after the price drop).