The latest version of Fix-It Utilities offers up a suite of programs to keep your PC running as smoothly as possible. Along with the central diagnostic and maintenance software, a virus scanner and anti-spyware program (courtesy of Trend Micro) are included, which is beyond the standard remit of this sort of package. Of course, most of us will already have these areas covered, but this will doubtless be a boon for some users.

Every facet of the suite is managed from the main menu, which gives you a quick and easy-to-understand readout of the current status of your system protection and system health. There's a set of one-click wizards here, and these run through a library of checks: for example, the Optimise wizard runs the full gamut of hard drive scans and maintenance.

The separate utility programs are then categorised under a number of sub-menus, the first of which is Diagnose. This contains PC Diagnostics, which performs a series of troubleshooting tests on your hardware with a specifiable depth (the thorough tests take quite some time). There's also a System Monitor facility with a huge range of options, so you can keep an eye not just on processor usage but also page-file usage, for example. Whether the average user needs a load of detailed stats is a debatable point, mind you, but they may be useful diagnostic tools from time to time.

The SMARTDiskcheck utility checks your hard drive for problems and alerts you to serious issues such as an imminent drive failure, which is obviously handy. There are a few other minor utilities here too, such as an Error Tracker that maintains a list of your Windows error messages for future reference.

Under the Fix & Maintain category sits DiskFixer, which is pretty much like ScanDisk but noticeably faster and more thorough. Alongside this are two registry utilities: Registry Fixer scans through and finds broken entries, giving you a full readout and advice on how to proceed, while Registry Editor is a simple editing program. The Fixer is very thorough and impressive.

The Optimisation utilities give the user a new disk defragmenter, JETDefrag. When we ran it on our hard drive it performed a full defrag within a reasonable time frame. It provides more options than the Windows defragmenter - although that isn't hard - and you can tweak variables such as how tightly files will be packed during the process (adjusting the slack outwards a little speeds up the defrag process). There's also Startup Commander nestled inside this category, which gives a thorough breakdown of your startup processes, including specific advice on many programs and whether or not you should disable them. Very handy indeed.

Finally, there's a number of other features, including a Disk Cleaner (though this isn't as thorough as some we've seen, only dealing with the basics such as temporary and Web cache files) and Recovery Commander, which takes a snapshot of your system and lets you boot from a recovery CD and restore Windows should it develop serious problems. On top of this, there's a File Undeleter.

There's an impressive stack of utilities here. Some are fairly basic, but many are very useful and user friendly. The inclusion of virus and spyware protection software also makes this a package that scores well in the value-for-money stakes. A good all-round effort.