Keeping the Old System Under Control . . .
A Review of Nuts and Bolts
by Ron Enderland
Utility packages have been offered since the dawn of time, as far as personal computers are concerned. Obviously, a collection of RAM, disk drives, processors, eyes of newt, toes of bat, etc., is inevitably going to act up. Norton Utilities, PC Tools, First Aid, and numerous other bundles have taken care of the various nasty tasks involved in keeping a machine running smoothly. So, why choose Nuts and Bolts? Well, in a word, value.
Nuts and Bolts offers seventeen different operations for keeping your computer happy. It does so for $49.00 (retail), and it does it very well, indeed. Some of these handy-dandy utilities include: ·
- Disk Minder This does what ScanDisk (included in the Windows 95 package) does and goes several steps further. It finds problems like damaged boot sectors, duplicate files, and partition goofups, and does it all in about half the time that ScanDisk does its thing. Even the scan of the disk’s surface goes much faster.
- Disk Tune This application compares to Disk Defragmenter. It goes further, in that the Win95 swap file is also defragmented. It runs much faster than Microsoft’s default utility. Unfortunately, on my system (Pentium 90, 20 MB RAM), it had a hard time with my C: drive. I have a 1.2 Gig hard disk partitioned into four different drives. Disk tune was not able to defragment C:, crashing early in the operation. Good old Defrag handled this drive, though, while Disk Tune sped through all of the others.
- Registry Wizard The Windows 95 registry is a source of much fear and loathing. Registry Wizard goes in and finds those pesky orphaned listings. It will then attempt to track them down for you and update their references in the registry. If it can’t find them, it will allow you to manually search for yourself, or to delete the reference. One little gripe: I had 167 "orphans" that I had to call up one at a time in order to delete. It would have been nice to be able to select large blocks of them to make this chore faster.
- Stronghold This utility allows drag-and-drop encrypting of files. You have your choice of security levels, which you select by choosing an algorithm. Triple DES is the most secure and slowest, although I didn’t notice any time difference on my machine between it and the simpler Blowfish standard. It has the easy Nuts and Bolts interface, making encryption a snap even for novices. You can also turn the file into a self-decrypting executable.
Other featured utilities include Rescue Disk (helps you recover from hard drive crashes), Discover Pro (benchmarking and system info), Win Gauge (a graphical representation of system performance), Zip Manager (a WinZip-like utility), EZ Setup (similar to Tweak UI, a free Microsoft download), Trash Guard (allows DOS-deleted and 16-bit Windows deleted files to go to the Recycle Bin), Cleanup Wizard (finds duplicate and temporary files) and Shredder (permanently deletes files beyond recovery). There are others, but I have to keep this review at a moderate length!
Free upgrades are made available to registered users through the internet.
To sum up, this is the best collection of utilities that I have found for the price. I would even rate its performance a bit higher than the excellent First Aid 97. Buy it, and get that system in shape.
MultiMedia Cafe Scorecard
| Product: | Nuts and Bolts |
| Company: | Helix Software Co. |
| Cost: | $49.95 |
System Requirements:
386 PC or greater
20 MB hard disk space
Windows 95 or Windows 3.1 or higher
8 MB RAM or more
CD-ROM drive
Breakdown:
Entertainment Value 5
Educational Value 5
Concept 5
Depth 5
Interface 5
Overall Score:
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