Formerly known as Wincleaner Utility Suite, Complete PC Care is designed to give your system a thorough spring clean. It also provides a set of easy-to-use tools to protect you from malicious software, maintain your privacy and keep your system running as fast as on the day you bought it.

Installation is very simple and a number of important functions can be used without installing anything at all. Many of the tools run directly from the CD, including the main One Click Cleanup. You can use this on as many PCs as you like, as it's only the installable tools that require separate licences.

During the scan, Cleanup seeks out items such as temporary and junk files, broken shortcuts, cookies and file and web history lists. Depending on how messy your system is, these operations alone can recover tens to hundreds of megabytes of hard disk space. Invalid Registry entries are also marked for deletion, followed by faulty start-up entries.

On completion you get an impressive list of items to be removed. You can now tell the package to either go ahead and delete them or abort the process. You don't get to select from a list of individual items, so it's all or nothing.

However, an advanced options menu lets you customise which operations are run in future scans and you can also select any cookies or privacy items you want to keep by explicitly protecting them from the cleaning process.

This is about the right level of sophistication for novice or intermediate-level users, but if you're after full control over individual items in each category then you're out of luck.

Once your hit list of nasties has been compiled you can choose simple deletion or three levels of secure erasure, which will overwrite the files with random data up to military standard security.

Cleanup is just one of the 18 tools included in the suite and if this is enough for you it's available as a standalone product. The Complete PC Care suite adds many extra useful utilities, divided into three main categories: the Clean and Fix category includes the aforementioned One Click Cleanup; a disk error checker; and a handy utility for recovering accidentally deleted files and folders.

Under the Optimize section there's a 'Startup Items' optimiser that checks all the programs configured to run at system boot and suggests which ones could be removed, reducing your boot time and removing any unwanted and/or malicious items in the process.

A defragmenter is provided, designed to defragment specific files or folders rather than your entire disk. The 'Registry Optimizer' reorganises and cleans your system Registry, reducing its size and making it faster to access, while the 'Memory Optimizer' is a tool that runs in the background, periodically maximising the amount of free memory available to Windows.

Finally, the Secure and Protect section includes a full antivirus program with a year of online updates included, as well as an internet pop-up stopper, a secure file eraser and a utility that monitors the health of your hard drives, warning you of any imminent failures or problems such as overheating.

One minor quibble is that, for a software suite as complex as this, printed documentation is limited to a brief quick-start guide. The individual tools are all very easy to use, but many are without adequate explanation.

For example, you can boot from the install CD to run an antivirus program designed to help you recover your PC from an attack, but this isn't mentioned anywhere in the quick-start guide or built-in help.

The most important aspect of this software suite is that it works. It's all very well displaying status reports festooned with impressive statistics boasting huge amounts of junk removed and problems resolved, but when you've finished cleaning and reboot your system to find it running significantly faster, you know some serious housework has taken place.

System requirements:

• Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP
• Internet Explorer 5 or higher
• 64MB of Ram
• 35MB hard disk space
• CD-Rom drive
• 16bit graphics card