The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Student Survival Kit Bernadette Houghton bernieh@iaccess.com.au

Student Survival Kit provides a basic set of security and housekeeping utilities to protect computers and data from most everyday menaces. All the utilities are extracted from other McAfee packages, rebundled in this instance with the needs of students in mind. A full version of McAfee's VirusScan is included, a huge incentive to purchase the Kit at very little extra cost.
 
Apart from the McAfee favourites, also included is the Adobe Acrobat reader, Nullsoft's WinAmp, a high-fidelity music player, and PowWow, a utility for creating online interactive communities, such as chat groups.
 
Once you've installed the Kit and VirusScan (separate processes, by the way), the software immediately seeks to connect with the McAfee Web site to check whether you're using the latest version, and downloads it if necessary. The Configuration Assistant then guides you through the process of setting options and otherwise configuring the software by a question and answer method.

Like McAfee's other recent products, the Kit focuses around a central menu screen, with most utilities arranged under four main functions. A minor, but very useful, innovation in the design of the menu is the inclusion of some system information on the opening screen. You can see at a glance which options of the Kit are currently active, when you last did a virus check, and the current state of your C: drive.

The functions in the Kit cover -

• Virus scanning, handled by VirusScan. VirusScan runs in the background and on demand, and can remove viruses and repair files. It is a highly configurable program capable of checking e-mail attachments, Internet downloads, network files, and Microsoft Word and Excel macros. 
  

• CleanUp, which does a quick and dirty trawl of your hard drive, emptying your Recycle Bin and removing junk and other clutter, such as lost file fragments and temporary files. 
  

• Backup and Restore, which includes several separate utilities. Registry Backup and Restore - surprise! surprise! - backs up and restores your Windows registry. McAfee Image looks after other essential files, including your computer's boot record, partition tables and file allocation tables. Safe and Sound transparently backs up files, drives or folders of your choice to a protected volume file or other desired location, and Rescue Disk creates an emergency repair toolkit for use in the event Windows refuses to load.
  

• Internet Options, which includes Ad Blocking to filter out banner advertisements from Web pages, E-mail Encryption to encode and decode e-mail, and Browser Buddy to enable you to keep track of username and password information for Web sites you visit.

The Kit also contains an Update button for checking to see whether later versions of the Kit are available, McAfee Scheduler so you can schedule tasks (e.g. virus scanning, defragmenting) as required, and a full version of WinGauge, to monitor the health and performance of your computer. WinGauge is highly customisable, with over 50 kinds of pre-defined gauges. You can really go to town on these, although the more gauges you have active at any one time, the greater the system overhead.

Assessment 

Student Survival Kit is a hodgepodge of utilities put together very quickly. This fact is obvious from a few highly visible glitches, such as navigation buttons which don't work consistently, help files which constantly refer to the utilities' parent product, and utilities which are a little out of date (e.g. WinGauge still offers the Time Remaining to 2000 gauge). Some utilities, when they've completed their run, don't tell you they've finished, but sit there waiting for you to notice - or run them again if you can't remember whether you've already done so!

Despite these minor inconveniences, the utilities do a reasonable job. They offer a useful selection of housekeeping and backup routines, and represent great value for money; especially when you consider that price of the Kit is only around $3 more than the street price of the full, stand-alone VirusScan.
 
Cost and Availability
 
$97.90 (inc. GST). Available from your local software retailer; otherwise contact Network Associates, Ph: (02) 8425 4200, fax (02) 9439 5166.
 
Minimum System Requirements
 
Pentium 100 MHz, Windows 95, 32 MB RAM, CD_ROM drive, 25 MB free space for complete Kit installation, Internet access. An extra 28 MB free space required if you install PowWow and WinAmp.

Reprinted from the February 2001 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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