REALHELP Extra Strength by Quarterdeck Corporation was introduced in December 1997 as an instant cure for PC headaches. There are two versions, REALHELP Extra Strength (RHES), costing $59.95 (contains extra features), and REALHELP regular, costing $39.95. I recommend RHES to our club and will continue to use it to solve computer problems. RHES requires Windows 95. It takes up 30MB of hard drive space and 8MB RAM (16MB recommended). The user needs a 486/33 or better computer with a CD_ROM (4X recommended). An internet connection is needed with Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, Versions 3.0 or later. I had no problems with the installation. I had another fix-it app on my hard drive and RHES removed it.

There are two main components in RHES. One is the Main Console. The other is the Service Manager. The Main Console starts with a menu selection where the user can opt to perform a complete diagnosis of their system or they can elect to focus on particular problems. The Service Manager continuously monitors your system. It is supposed to diagnose and fix problems before a crash occurs. It can stop a crash and allow users to save their work. It can quickly find solutions to just about any PC problem.

There are five subcomponents on the Main Console to help the user discover and fix problems. The first subcomponent is Prevention. This contains the conflict detector, preinstall inspector, service manager, and ViruSweep, a powerful anti-virus scan. The next one is Repair. This subcomponent has the change remover, emergency recovery disk (ER)and the performance optimizer. Diagnostics is number three. It does a full system check on twelve items; the cd_rom, hard drive, keyboard, memory, modem, mouse, pcmcia card, printer, sound card, speaker, system board, and video. Inventory is the fourth subcomponent. It lists the user's system hardware and software currently installed on their PC. And lastly there is Support. This subcomponent contains five subunits. Find a fix searches for help on the RHES CD or the internet can be accessed for more helpful information. There is a log viewer which displays the results of current tests. The third is online registration. Fourth, there is a vendor list containing hundreds of vendors' names, addresses, and phone numbers which can be automatically dialed.

Lastly there is a program called TuneUp -24 hour technical support help. TuneUp.com comes free for a year with RH Extra Strength version. TuneUp keeps your computer software up to date. It searches for any updates for any of the user's installed hardware drivers and software applications and downloads them for the user to use. I clicked on update and downloaded the latest changes applications and hardware device drivers. Then I ran a virus check. My computer has no viruses in the memory, boot sector nor files.

After installation and when you restart your computer the Service Manager automatically starts. This is RHES ActiveSystem's monitoring component that continuously checks for software conflicts to spot potential problems and to automatically fix the problems. An icon in the form of a flag appears in the Windows system tray tray. It can be green, yellow or red. Green indicates that all your system components are working correctly. Yellow indicates that one or more of the components are within 10% of the threshold you set in the Service Manager. Red indicates that one or more of the components are faulty or has exceeded its assigned threshold. Click once on the flag icon and messages relating to your system's current status will appear. I clicked and had many messages. There were application conflicts detected, missing files detected, hardware conflicts detected, invalid entries in the windows registry detected and cpu load exceeded the threshold. I needed HELP.

I started by clicking on diagnostics and doing a full system check. Diagnostics also checked my system for conflicts, future problems because of orphan files, viruses, and the performance of: the file system, graphics, virtual memory and the cd-rom. Everything passed except in the problem prevention area. There were 28 unresolved shortcuts - many for applications I had uninstalled. I clicked on the fix-it button and 15 were automatically fixed. I was given a choice for the other 13 to manually delete them which I did one-by-one. There were 32 unresolved registry entries. Clicking on fix took care of 6. The other 26 are still unresolved. Many were shared dlls and help files. They are still unresolved as I did not want to delete items from the registry until I am more knowledgeable about what I am doing. I could not resolve the one hardware conflict which was with a secondary IDE controller. It did not appear in the Windows 95 device manager although it appeared in the RHES device manager. My cpu is still exceeding the threshold. I kept changing the threshold but the warning window kept and still does keep popping up. This is a mystery to me and needs more work.

One other problem I had was with the emergency recovery disk (ER). I clicked on 911, the ER in the Service Manager component. I followed the directions and filled two disks with compressed files. I tried them out and received the message "There is something physically wrong with hardware. Recover has aborted the recover operation at this time. Please consult a hardware specialist.. Aborted recovery. Operation due to user response or as a result of conditions which prevent Recover from continuing without risk to this system. Do you wish to continue or abort?" I aborted, scanned and defragmented the hard drive and made a new ER. I booted up with it and again received the above message. My computer boots up fine without using the ER.

Another mystery to solve. Previously I had been getting error messages which either froze my system or ended the program on which I was working. I have been getting very few since I installed RHES.

I think that this is a complex application which takes time to try out and read about all its features. But I think that in the end it is worth it. The user learns a lot about their computer. They can also avoid a number of problems. I still have a lot to learn. The User guide is thorough and I used it quite a bit.