Everyone knows that Windows can be a cantankerous beast, with crashes and data loss left, right and centre - and that's on a good day.

Perhaps we're exaggerating slightly, but few Windows users can claim to have never lost patience with the unpredictable nature of the ubiquitous operating system.

Luckily for us, Symantec has bundled seven diagnostic tools to make life that little bit easier.

It may be disparaging to suggest that Norton Systemworks 2000 is a bundle, because one of its most impressive aspects is the almost seamless integration between its disparate elements. The manufacturer calls this Norton Symmetry. Essentially the products look, feel and act the same to give an impression of continuity when switching from one to another. Appearances are all very, but how well does each application perform?

The heavyweight from the Symantec stable is clearly Norton Utilities 2000 (an updated version of the separately available product) and its array of 14 so-called fix-it tools, each of which can be launched individually and configured through the central Systemworks control panel.

The thrust of Utilities is pretty obvious from the name of each constituent: System Check, Speed Disk and WinDoctor. What's more, each does what it says on the box. Speed Disk in particular is a useful tool for beefing up hard disk performance, because it does in 10 minutes what Windows' Disk Defragmenter dawdles over all day. The Optimization Wizard is also noteworthy and produced clear performance improvements on our test system.

Norton Antivirus is one of our long-term favourites and the latest version adds extra virus utilities and also enables the user to create rescue disks - a simple, yet powerful feature. Cleansweep and the Millennium Bug test application, Norton 2000, also perform as well as claimed.

However, we do have reservations about the accuracy of the Year 2000 diagnostic reports, although this is a notoriously tricky area.

The last of the major features of the Norton package is Crashguard 2000 - a program that has been around for a while. The AntiFreeze element of Crashguard is useful for dealing with programs that have already committed hara-kiri, disposing of the evidence with a quick Ctrl+Alt+Del without forcing the whole system to nosedive. Unfortunately, Crashguard itself seems a little arrogant, jumping in to warn of impending doom in applications that were, and always had been, functioning perfectly.

Of the other bits and pieces rattling around in the box, by far the most useful are the set of emergency disks designed to resurrect any busted and battered PC, Norton Ghost 2000. Ghost creates perfect clones of hard disks. It might not sound like much, but just try upgrading to a new 20Gb hard disk without a cloning utility and you'll see why we rate it so highly.

Finally, Norton Web Services is a feature that might come in useful in the event of a new virus doing the rounds. The alternative - automatic downloads of the latest software and hardware drivers - isn't quite so appealing.

The main elements of Norton Systemworks 2000 - particularly Antivirus and Utilities - make the package worth having but, unless you need every application, you may prefer to stick to buying individual products.

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Contact Symantec 020 7616 5600