Product: McAfee Office	Company: Network Associates
Web: www.nai.com	Phone: 408-988-3832
Platform:	SRP: US$100 Street Price: US$60
Cred Rating:	Special Award:

McAfee is a name that's associated with high-quality PC software utilities. Now they've put the best, most useful products in their line into one package that offers just about everything you need to keep your computer happy, safe and clutter-free.

• Nuts and Bolts, one of McAfee's most popular products, offers a dizzying array of diagnostic and repair tools. In fact, it has so many features that people have criticized it, claiming it's too intimidating. This would be the case if it was poorly designed, but the interface allows you to access only those features you care about. If all you want to do is create an image file, run a PC checkup, defrag your hard drive or troubleshoot a disk problem, you can do that. If you want to delve deeper into the guts of your system, to see what tasks are running, how your RAM is allocated, what your I/O ports are up to, you can do all this and LOTS more. Besides all of these capabilities being well presented, they also offer you several different interfaces, with different levels of detail for the basic and advanced user.

  One feature in the advanced diagnostics that I've found useful is the Task List tab of the Software diagnostics tool. It allows you to see which tasks are active and what they're attached to. If you've ever hit ctrl+alt+delete and stared dumbfounded at a list of items with handles like "rtfixm32," "osa" and "hde," you've probably wondered what these routines are attached to and if they need to be running. Windows is a "cooperative" muti-tasking OS which means that tasks that aren't actually being used still hog processing time. Too many of these deadbeats can slow system performance (at least a little). Once you know what's what, you can shut down inactive tasks without fear of closing something you need.

  

  We have no idea what all this means, but it sure looks cool! ;-)

• VirusScan hunts down everything viral, including malicious Java applets and email attachments (take that, Melissa!). Behind VirusScan is AVERT (Anti-Virus Emergency Response Team), an international staff of virus researchers who offer 24/7 virus hunting. SecureCast, an Internet push feature, allows you to keep your virus signature files as up to date as possible. When new signature files are released, they are automatically loaded to your desktop when you connect to the Net.

• Uninstaller removes applications, offering more useful options than the standard Microsoft Add/Remove utility. The Windows Explorer-like interface might be slightly confusing if you're used to the point and shoot ease of Add/Remove, but the expanded feature set is worth figuring out the initial eccentricities of the program.

• Automatically repairing common software and hardware problems as they occur is what First Aid 98 is all about. First Aid will check your drives and automatically fix problems if it can. If not, it will walk you through a manual repair. First Aid also includes Windows Guardian, a utility that monitors your system and alerts you to certain software and hardware problems as (or before) they happen. This is the most user-friendly package in Office. It comes with a *very* user-friendly (read: the narrator's as condescending as Al Gore at a senior citizens luncheon) video tutorial and a graphical interface that shows pictures of your desktop hardware. Click on a machine and a pop-up menu offers you testing and repair options.

• Hurricane 98 is supposed to speed up Windows OS and application launch times. If this works, I wouldn't know because Bomb Shelter (crash protection software), McAfee's answer to Norton's CrashGuard, strangles the Windows load time. (Also like CrashGuard, it seems to create as many problems as it solves). If Hurricane accelerates application launches, running at 450MHz, I probably wouldn't notice anyway. Hurricane does include some cool features like RAM Expander which reduces your system's need for virtual memory (speeding up your system) and Cache Compressor which compresses cache contents, creating a larger cache space which allegedly improves performance.

  If you've ever experienced the frustration of getting a piece of hardware, trying to install it and then discovering that the driver or other software is not current, you can appreciate what Oil Change can do for you...for a price. It will update much of the software on your system by keeping track of what versions you have and what versions and bug fixes are available online. I ran the program and discovered that there are 75 software updates online with my name of them, *if* I want to plunk down US$40/year to get them. Obviously, you can track these updates yourself, but if you're busy and want your machine to do its own update shopping, maybe it's worth it. (The free alternative to this is to make a bookmark folder on your browser linked to all of the update pages of your key software and check it every month or so.)

  If you're worried about Y2K, 2000 Toolbox will scan your system and root out Y2K problems. It will fix some of them (like BIOS dates) and alert you to others that need to be manually fixed (like Excel spreadsheet date-based calculations).

  Guard Dog provides desktop and Internet security by keeping your browsing habits confidential and preventing people online from accessing sensitive data on your desktop. Some of its features include Cookie Blocker (which prevents sites from gathering information about your browsing habits), Web Trail Cleaner (buries the tracks you leave through cyberspace) and Search Filter (which prevents information you enter in one website from being handed off to another).

  One of the most respected email and document encryption programs is PGP Personal Privacy v. 6.0 ("PGP" stands for "Pretty Good Privacy"). This program includes PGPdisk (for securing a hard disk), PGPkeys (the public key encryption program), PGPtools (which allows you to send encrypted files as email attachments) and PGP Wipe (a permanent file deletion program).

  Rounding out this chunky toolbox of utility programs is McAfee Virtual Office (more commonly referred to as one of those freebie website and Web-based email accounts that everyone already has).

  There are diehard Norton Utility fans who turn their noses up at Nuts & Bolts, First Aid and the other products on this disk. From my own subjective experience, they both have their strengths and weaknesses. Personally, I like the McAfee products better. I don't know what half of the diagnostic tools in Nuts & Bolts do, but looking at the perdy real-time readouts, graphs and pie charts sure is fun. I bet a *real* geek could have loads of fun with this thing. And I know my computer isn't sentient, but I swear it's been acting nicer to me ever since I installed McAfee Office. You can't get a better endorsement than that.

  - Gareth Branwyn [4/11/99]

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©1999 Carton Donofrio Interactive/Gareth Branwyn
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