Oops! It seems that I missed a whole area of Discover Pro, -- Diagnostics. I will straighten that out here.

The last tab at the top of the Discover Pro window is Diagnostics. You may select serial, parallel, hard drive, RAM and system tests. When the test button is clicked on this first screen, some quick, straightforward tests are run. More involved diagnostics are available by way of the advanced selection.

The advanced button shows a frame at the left with an icon for each of the above subsystems. One first needs to select a drive or drives to test, then you may choose items such as: hard drive partitions and valid filenames, CMOS and timer system tests, L 1 cache, CPU and patterns in RAM, up to four serial ports at speeds up to 115,200 can be analyzed, as well as up to three parallel ports' configurations.

When the 'run tests' button is clicked in any of the screens, a progress bar or information area keeps you informed of the item being tested and the percentage of completion. As the tests are finished, a dialog box displays their results. The RAM tests can take quite a long time if all the boxes are checked.

Last month's effort dealt with the first part of Network Associate's Nuts & Bolts utilities suite. This time I want to look at N&B's second section, Clean/Optimize. Cleanup Wizard, Disk Tune - a defragmenter, the Registry and Shortcut Wizards and Launch Rocket are the utilities here.

The opening screen of Cleanup Wizard tells you that it will help you cleanup unneeded and unused files and allow you to optionally discard or archive them, even to a Zip disk. It offers two modes of operation, express and custom. You can fine tune express mode with the properties button. There is also a custom mode. The help file suggests that you use Cleanup fairly often, once a week to once a month, or so.

There are three safety levels at which CW runs. Safe, OK but use some judgment, and you better know what the hell you are doing. I ran it in the safe mode.

The next step is choosing a drive and the next is selecting a type of file to scan. You can select duplicate, orphan, old or large or all files or custom categories. Archive, backup and temporary are some of the custom types.

Unless you've chosen Windows 98's or 2000's High Performance File System, your files become fragmented as you delete and save data. For example, the operating system trying to put a 200 Kb file in a 50 Kb space, puts what it can in it and the rest in any number of other spaces until it gets it all saved. This continues over and over again until four or five percent or more of your files are in pieces scattered all over your hard drive. When the computer goes looking for a file, the heads of the drive jump from place to place to find each successive piece until the whole file is retrieved. Although the read/write heads move very fast, this takes more time than just going to one spot on the disk and reading the data sequentially. It also causes more mechanical wear on the heads mechanism.

After selecting the disk(s) you want to tune, you see a window that tells you about the four levels of tuning available: Reorder & unfragment, full unfragment, quick unfragment and consolidate free space. They provide, in descending amounts, performance increase and optimization, file unfragmentation, (increased) future fragmentation potential and amount of time to run.

While you are reading this information, the main window is painting in the background. Most of it is an area of many little squares (optionally circles or bars) that eventually have a color. When 'Tune' is finished analyzing your disk, its percentage fragmentation is shown at the window's lower left. A key at the top tells you how many DOS clusters each square represents. The left side of the window contains three areas.

The topmost area is a color key. The squares on the right change color as the software runs to let you know what is happening on that part of the disk. Eventually, when the program is through, all the squares are the same color.

The middle area has the four methods of operation that are available. One is already selected for you based on the analysis of the drive. You may accept that method or choose another one.

The third area is a slider with "responsive system" at the top and "faster disk tune" at the bottom. As you drag the slider, a number is displayed in the box that changes from a lower figure when the slider is all the way towards responsive system to a higher figure as you move the slider to the other end. Since I have usually found other things to do while DT is running, I've always selected responsive system. The full explanation of the slider's function is buried deep in the help text. If you find it, write a summary and submit it to the editor for the newsletter.

Clicking on the advanced button near the bottom of the main window allows you to fine tune the operation of Disk Tune in a myriad of ways. My tendency is to leave the defaults as they are. I checked "show final organization" and did not choose the very long-running "compare" type of verification, both under the functions tab. I elected to sort directories by descending size-big to little --and ascending alphabetically, name and extension. I did not make any changes in the file placement and global settings areas.

A unique feature of this program is the way it states its progress as it runs. The amount of data remaining to be moved in kilobytes is indicated in the area at the window's bottom left instead of a percent complete. That figure is in a progress bar at the bottom right. An elapsed time meter is between the above two.

Next is the Registry Wizard. It makes maintenance, troubleshooting, and repair of the Windows Registry database a quick and easy process (to quote the help file). The first screen shows four choices, Backup & Restore, Clean, Repair and Tune Up. It recommends that you perform each in order, if you use it at all. It is for Windows 95 & 98 ONLY. This may be an excellent and safe utility, but I recommend a verified backup of all critical applications and data immediately before using this function.

There are some times, however, that the registry is causing problems and needs to be disciplined. The Wizard is your man. Before you go any further, backup your registry.

When clean is selected, you have three boxes that may be checked on the next screen: recent docs, tip of the day and doc find list. Some additional choices are available under the advanced button. Click finish and a bell sounds when things are done.

Repair says it will deal with registry entries for files that have been moved or no longer exit. After some disk activity, you get a screen of all the keys-that's what they call files in the registry-that need attention. You can look at the advanced screen, but I didn't feel confident changing anything there. Click on repair all, next. After some more disk activity, a highlighted list of files appears with a caption of blank out of blank orphans found. You may click don't fix, but what reason are you here for? The remaining orphans (if any) are displayed for further attention.

The grayed-out repair button becomes available when one of the listings is selected. Pressing it makes the entry disappear after another window offering additional information pops up and delete value is clicked. BE VERY CAREFUL WHEN MANUALLY DELETING THESE ITEMS. IF YOU ARE NOT SURE WHAT AN ITEM IS FOR, LEAVE IT ALONE! You proceed one file at a time (you cannot select more than one) until all the items you are comfortable deleting are gone.

The Shortcut Wizard examines all of your shortcuts and deletes or repairs any invalid ones. It examines the hard drive and lists orphaned or invalid shortcuts-is this beginning to sound familiar? You can click repair all and fix all and that's all.

Launch Rocket is known by SpeedStart or other names in other utility collections. If you have an application that seems to load very slowly, sic LR on it. When next is clicked from its first screen, you guessed it, a list of applications appears. You can choose to accelerate each one on the list, or not.

Normal or Super acceleration or none can be set for an application on the list. All the programs that are found are set to normal by default. A file name can be removed from the list, also. A file that is several megabytes in size is created by LR, so beware if you are a little short on disk space.

That covers Clean/Optimize. Next time, Prevent/Protect.