Add to Favorites     Make Home Page As programs and computers get more complicated, it has become necessary to install some sort of utility to stop crashes, resolve conflicts, and fix Windows Registry settings. Symantec has Norton Utilities; McAfee has Nuts & Bolts; Mijenix has Fit-It Utilities. With their latest installment, Fit-It Utilities 99 (hereafter referred to FIU99), Mijenix (a subsidiary of Ontrack Data International, Inc.) has come out with the best of the bunch. On the inside flap of the boxed version, Mijenix claims "unlike the others, it's lean, fast, and fully integrated." I haven't agreed with a statement about a program so much in a long time. Fix-It Utilities has everything that you would expect in a system utility suite: Defrag Disk Scanner Registry cleaner fixer optimizer Full Hardware Testing Virus Checker Crash Protection Disk Cleaner and much more... The whole thing is packaged together in a beautifully integrated Control Panel. Everything is available from this one screen. I'd like to focus on 3 features: the Defrag Plus program (found under the Disks and Files menu), the Registry Cleaner (found under the System Registry menu), and Crash Proof 99 (found under the System Protection menu). Defrag Plus is the disk defragmenter program that comes with FIU99. It can read FAT, FAT32, and NTFS file systems and works well with all of them. The defrag process is done in 2 parts. The files themselves are defragmented (put in contiguous sectors), and then the hard drive free space is consolidated (files at the beginning of the drive, free space at the end). The consolidation of the free space is what takes the longest, and by separating the 2 processes, you can actually get back to using your computer sooner. When the defragmenting is done, you can stop the consolidate free space (or in the options choose not to run it at all), and the hard drive is ready. You can also choose what priority level you want DefragPlus to run. If you have it set at high, it will finish faster, but you won't really be able to use your computer. If you still need to use your computer can set the priority to low, and although significantly longer, the defragmenting will still get done eventually in the background. The Registry tools with FIU99 are my favourite features. You can clean the registry, fix erroneous entries, and defragment it. The Fixer is the most notable. When you install programs, they installation routine usually adds some entries to the registry. When you uninstall that program, those entries should be removed. Unfortunately, this doesn't always happen. You get left with orphan entries, entries that exist, but don['t point to any files or folders or point to the wrong files. Registry entries can also point to other registry entries that don't exist any more. If the registry has too many of these entries, you computer can slow down, and in some extreme cases, can even crash. Therefore, it is a good idea to fix the registry every once in a while as part of your computer maintenance. All the major utility suites come with a registry cleaner/fixer, but what is most interesting about FIU99 is that when it is finished fixing the registry, it recommends to go back as some of the fixes may result in more errors (removing a registry entry may have result in orphaning another entry that points to the now deleted entry). I had never thought of this before, and sure enough, there were other things that could be fixed. After running it 3 times, there were finally no more problems. There may be other programs that prompt you to do this, but FIU99 is the first one I've used. With the pressure that companies are under to release new version of their software, it is virtually impossible to keep your system crash free. Crash protection programs try to stop crashes before they happen. It had been my experience that when using Norton CrashGuard, when you tried to unfreeze a program, I usually still couldn't use it, and it also usually caused my whole system to freeze up. I would then have to reboot my computer and anything that was open in other applications would be lost. With the Crash Protection built into FIU99, if this sort of thing will happen (if the program has already reached the point of no return), then you are told that you can't revive it. It doesn't even try. I guess you may lose a little bit of data this way, but I have been better off using FIU99 than other programs. Perhaps one of the most innovative features of Fix-It is that it can be used on all platforms of 32-bit Windows; Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT. Most utility suites can't defrag a NTFS drive, but Fix-It can. If you are multi-booting various operating systems on one machine, this will save the cost of buying a FAT defrag utility and a NTFS defrag utility. The first thing you will notice when you install the program is how fast the installation goes. It seemed to finish almost instantly. Once installed, the next thing you will notice is the excellent interface. Everything is available from one screen. The September 1999 issue of PC Computing magazine tested the performance of the Norton SystemWorks 2000 McAfee Office 2000 And Mijenix Fit-It Utilities 99, and they found that Norton SystemWorks made the system 18% slower, McAfee Office 2000 slowed the system down by 17%, and Fix-It Utilities 99 only made the system 5% slower. This is the way a utility suite should be, powerful enough to do everything, but sleek enough to not know that it is there. FIU99 does this better than any other program. As an added bonus, when you buy Fix-It Utilities 99, you also get PowerDesk Utilities 98 free. View my online review for it at http://www.pcin.net/help/software/powerdesk.shtml. You can buy Fit-It Utilities 99 for $49.95 US if you are willing to download it. It will cost you $49.95 US + S&H if you want the boxed version. Did you find this review helpful? 10 - Useful 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 - Not Useful The average rating for this review is: The query failed! table_name must be a valid table name that exists in the database specified in mysql_select_db