System Suite 9 Professional

Solid hard drive utilities paired with limited security




AVANQUEST'S System Suite 9 Professional is improved from last year's version, with more configurability, but it still lacks the easy access to system information that many users will want.

System Suite 9 Professional's disk utilities can help your computer recover from crashes, defragment both your hard drive and Registry, shred files, analyze and fix disk problems, and perform Web-content cleanup. While the apps lack depth, they're good for an all-around package.

The major improvement in this release is Sunbelt's Virus Intrusion Prevention and Recognition Engine (VIPRE), which is better at catching malware and easier to configure than last year's version. The NetDefense firewall also now lets you define specific ports and addresses that a program accessing the Web from your computer should employ.

One problem was the lack of useful information provided by its antivirus component, which seldom stated what threat had been found and never linked to a site giving more detail on that threat's means and likely frequency rate of infection. Otherwise, System Suite 9 nicely covers the security basics, though as with the hard drive tools you can find considerably more features in other products.



We ran into some trouble finding LinkScanner (which finds and prevents access to dangerous Web links), which has no button on the main screen, and we found that it blocked major Web sites with little cause when used with Firefox 3. Some overall sloppiness in the software, in terms of design and typos, also mars the experience. At least there's a high-quality manual and a good online help system, though the lack of context-sensitive help can make it hard to get all the answers you need. —Barry Brenesal

Computer Shopper March 2009