good utility suite for xp?

the subscriptions to Norton Systemworks Pro 2003 on our home computers is about to expire next week, and instead of renewing it for another year at 25-30 dollars, i was wondering if there is anything better? Sysworks 2004 did not get good reviews, ditto 2005. what else is out there? something has has a robust antivirus, disk defragment, registry cleaner, disk error check, etc. I'll have to buy 3 copies for 3 computers, so if OEM versions are available, that will save me some money.

or should i ditch the idea of a suite, and get a standalone a/v app like the new mcafee, and use windows' built in defrag/disk check app? what about keeping the registry clean?

thanks

For AV there's a lot of other options, AVG and Avast! are both free I believe. I don't know about the others, though, I don't tend to do enough with my disks to need frequent defragmentation nor do I install or remove much to need registry cleaning. And sometimes I use Linux. .

I use McAfee (anti-virus only). I use the built-in defrag. I use the built-in disk check too but it never found a problem in 6 years.

To see if my drive is gonna die on me I use a disk drive diagnostic from a drive manufacturer. Most are stand-alone but Western Digital has one that runs under XP. You'll never find it by yourself though. It's WinDLG.zip under the heading "Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows" on this page:
http://support.wdc.com/download/downloadxml.asp#3

Systemworks usually only changes when the operating system changes, so you shouldn't need to update it. Just the firewall and antivirus definitions. I find it cheaper to buy the next version OEM style from a vendor at pricewatch.com. Takes a bit of shopping to find the best deal but you can save a bunch.

We use and recommend Avast! to all out clients for an anti-virus. It really is a great package. Tight code and fast.
There are no 'utility' packages that do everything well we have found. Having said that, I use 'Fix-it'(http://www.v-com.com/product/Fix-It_Utilities_Home.html) with most of the 600 machines we look after. It contains an A/V but that does not get installed. Remember if you have more than 1 A/V installed at once they cancel each other out.
Defraging is not really needed on modern HDD as the seek times are no so fast that the performance increase of sequental files is not really noticaeable unless it's Really bad.
What I use almost everyday:
Spybot S&D (freeware) is great to help block some nasties.
Avast A/V (www.avast.com) for Anti virus
A back-up program (Nero sort of app that comes with burners is good)
Registry cleaner / backup utility (fix-it)
Spy-sweeper for Spyware detection/removal

Hope that helps some

i move a lot of photos/video and email dbase too (2.5g worth), and the disks (older drives) do get fragmented quickly. since we're on dialup, windows xp sp2 firewall works well enough that i dont need another firewall, and yes, spybot and spywareblaster are both installed on all computers. for backing up i manually burn off disks as needed.

I don't know for sure, but I'm all but certain that there are better utilities than Symantec to do everything you want. You've already learned of a few in here, actually. What ones do you still need??

I have Systemworks 2003 installed in one machine but with more modern version of Internet Security. Every week it does it's scan and always finds registry and shortcut errors in which I let it repair. Second machine I just have the free AVG anti-virus and the SP2 firewall. Both machines generally run fine. I guess these shortcuts and registry errors aren't really very critical.

so if i just get an a/v app, and use windows to diskcheck/defrag, the registry bugaboos aren't worth worrying over? i'm thinking a slowish processor (1.4G), 100fsb mobo, and older drives, any gains in performance are good, esp since systemworks often finds a whole bunch of errors (not just misplaced shortcuts, of which there are many) but invalid xcom (???) entries, and stuff since i'm often installing and uninstalling small programs/demos to try them out.

I researched for several days and came up with something interesting, one of the anit virus pioneers based in Moscow. I've been very happy with their service and also found a good firewall, freeware, zonealarm both are linked below.
http://www.kaspersky.com/index.html
http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/catalog/products/sku_list_za.jsp