Most software applications a small business is likely to buy have fairly self-explanatory functions. The word processor processes the words. The spreadsheet is a spreadsheet, photo editors edit photos - just say if this is going too quickly for you, won't you? Only then you come to another category on the software shelves: "utility software", it says. And it has nothing to do with gas, electricity and water.
Essentially, the idea of a utility package is to make your system run better, and the market leaders are Norton Utilities from Symantec and McAfee Utilities from Network Associates. The names are a good clue; they are essentially hangovers from previous owners, long since bought out by the current software publishers.
So, what does this stuff actually do that Windows doesn't? That question will depend largely on which version of Windows a company is using. Ever since Windows 98, for example, PCs have been able to defragment themselves (see next page for an explanation of what this does), but people with older versions might want the capacity to do it without the need to upgrade their computer. It is worth mentioning that computers that are already running to capacity might well slow down if some of the background functions within the utility packages are switched on the whole time.
"[Our utilities product] is very much a legacy product," confirms Atri Chatterjee, vice president of worldwide marketing at McAfee.com. "A lot of the functions are duplicated, particularly in Microsoft Windows XP, but there are still a lot of customers out there with Windows 95, 98 and 2000." Network Associates, McAfee.com's parent company, now focuses more closely on the security arena, in which add-ons to the basic system are almost essential.
Interestingly, Symantec still markets its Norton Utilities system fairly aggressively, and doesn't have any reservations about saying so. "Norton Utilities and Norton Systemworks offer more robust productivity and problem-solving tools than those offered as part of Windows XP," says Kevin Chapman, consumer and small business director of Symantec UK. "In all Windows platforms, users have to hunt around to find the specific tools. This is not so easy for a novice user who may not know where to find the Windows defragger or know what it does."
It's a fair point, and both flavours of utility package offer aids to systems that are difficult to find if you don't know which menus to dig at in Windows. The McAfee product, still advertised on the company website but curiously absent from a number of UK online retailers, offers crash protection and backs up files on the quiet; it organises your file system so that your hard disk uses all of its available space, and has a neat utility called TaskMaster that allows you to tailor how your computer starts up. So if you have to do something with, say, graphics that is likely to slow your system down, you can start up with fewer programs than usual running in the background.
Norton, similarly, has features to offer that you might find absent from Windows itself: a utility called Norton System Doctor keeps an eye on your computer and the workload you're placing on the chip, and has a widget called Wipe that will render a file unrecoverable rather than the standard "delete".
The extras you get, though, are now much less than they used to be compared to the basic Windows and have a distinct air of "optional" about them by now. An element of a system that is more essential is the firewall, the software that blocks intruders from getting into your system while you're on the internet, which can be quite a lot of the time for many computer users. Windows XP has a firewall in it, but a number of companies maintain theirs is better. "[Norton Firewall] is the only firewall product that sets up rules for the most popular online programs automatically to get superior protection without hassle," says Symantec's Chapman.
McAfee.com's Chatterjee meanwhile points out that the Microsoft firewall protects against the two most common network protocols and does a good job, but it doesn't report what's happening to the person using the computer and nor does it account for any of the hundreds of minority protocols that are around. "We are actually working with Microsoft on this," he says. "There is value in having your firewall made by a specialist security company."
There are other utilities as well. Roxio's GoBack enables a system to be reset to a point when it was working better. This appears to duplicate one of the new functions in Windows XP but again, issues surrounding ease of use and finding the function in Windows (it's in the system tools folder) may make this a better option for some people, particularly since it monitors every change in a computer automatically if you ask it nicely.
Help panel
Other utilities
There are other utility packages aiming at making systems run better or safer, whose functions aren't actually duplicated in any edition of Windows yet. These include:
· Antivirus products: a specialised area that the operating system manufacturers are unlikely to touch for a good while yet, if at all.
· Logging and reporting of attacks through the internet; for the moment you get basic blocking and that's all.
· Automatic defragmentation: in Windows and on the Mac you need to start defragmenting your hard disk (see top 10 tips, opposite) manually; with some of the utility software on the market you don't need to.
· Fixing memory leaks: sometimes systems slow down because an application is using more memory than it ought to. McAfee and others offer products that should fix the problem.
