$50 utilities suite lets you be your PC's Felix Unger
I've been a Norton Utilities fan ever since I started fiddling with computers. Now I've found something better.
By John Breeden II
GCN Staff
I've been a Norton Utilities fan ever since I started fiddling with computers. Now I've found something better.
The Fix-It Utilities 99 suite from Mijenix Corp. is easy to use, powerful and, in all my tests, highly reliable. It runs just fine under Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows NT.
Most other suites require separate versions for 9x and NT.
The economic logic of separating the 9x from the NT utilities is that you are getting only one license, so the vendor wants you to buy separate programs.
Also, NT utilities differ slightly from others because of the operating system's strictures. Fix-It handles this well by installing slightly different versions of the suite de-pending on the system.
One of Windows' greatest annoyances has been that its registry does not accurately reflect program removal. After a few months' use, the registry file balloons with links to programs that no longer exist.
Utilities to fix the NT registry usually fall far short of users' needs. When I have tested registry fixer-upper components, sometimes my test system has crashed. Messing up the registry is an almost surefire way to slow or cripple a system.
For this review, my test system was about a year old, with a meticulously and manually cleaned registry. The utility took about a minute to scan the registry file. When the dust settled, Fix-It had located an astonishing 447 invalid entries. It found entries pointing to programs uninstalled long ago. But I was more impressed by its ability to locate entries for programs that had been upgraded yet still pointed to old locations.
Most of the time, Fix-It found the new locations of programs that had been upgraded. It did not automatically rewrite the registry but instead flagged the moved files so I could approve each change.
Under Win98, I tested another suite component that often causes trouble: the crash-guard utility. Instead of avoiding crashes, such Win98 utilities often cause extra grief. But the Fix-It crash-guard utility worked, managing to stop several crashes I induced.''
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Fix-It Utilities 99 Mijenix Corp., Boulder, Colo.; tel. 303-245-8000 www.mijenix.com Price: $49.95 Pros and cons: +Registry fixer program especially good +Excellent user interface 'Performance problems with disk defragmentation tool Real-life requirements: Windows 9x or NT, 8M of RAM for 9x or 16M for NT, 20M of free storage |
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