The aim of VCOM Powerdesk Pro 7 is, seemingly, to provide a Swiss army knife of utilities to help with the running and maintenance of an everyday PC. As such, included in the package is an FTP client, an archive tool (à la WinZip), a fast file finder, a sync manager and a size management tool.

The program, once installed, opens at a main working window that doesn't give you many clues about what to do next. It's a two-pane window, with your computer's directory structure mirrored in both (oldies will recall the Norton Commander and similar command-line utilities). Then on top of that are four rows of icons, with the traditional drop-down menus sitting above those. It's fair to say that initial impressions are that it's quite confusing.

But then it does pack a lot in, with several key tools under the bonnet. Among them, the Sync Manager is quite useful if you're the kind of person with flash drives and portable storage on the go, allowing you to set up synchronisation of said units into a specific folder.

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You can choose whether to update all files or just pick up on changes, and it's an efficient little tool, if a little bit fiddly to get going with (the over-reliance on small icons does mean you need to check what it is you're supposed to press and when). As VCOM points out, it's useful if you work across more than one machine, too, with networks supported.

The FTP client doesn't add anything of real note over a freeware alternative such as FileZilla, but it's an efficient enough drag-and-drop affair that's easy enough to work with. It works from within the same window set-up as some of PowerDesk's other tools, and that continuity will clearly appeal to some.

The File Finder isn't a particularly quick way to hunt down something you're looking for, but it does come with exhaustive search criteria if you're really looking to find a rogue file. You can demand certain file types, certain dates and hunt through the content of files (include zip archives), among the many criteria, although for day-to-day use an indexed search utility such as Mo-Search is probably a better bet.

Next up is the Size Manager, which is a really handy little tool. It breaks down, drive by drive, exactly what's gobbling up your space. So, for instance, on our test machine we learnt that a game we thought had been long-deleted was still eating up 30MB of our hard drive. You can break things down program by program to find out their hard drive footprint. We found this really useful and a quick, snappy way to get an overview of a drive.

The File Viewer is a way to get a preview of the contents of a file without having to open it. We did have trouble with Office 2007 files, but for most other office and common file types it worked well. On top of these, PowerDesk also has a Favorites option, allows you to manage the likes of your music collection (although not as well as a specialist tool would), and includes a hex editor too.

There doesn't, however, seem to be a difference of real note from PowerDesk 6, and you wonder if VCOM has fallen foul of the urge to roll out another edition to keep the spreadsheets happier than its customers ('Vista-ready' is one of the main championed features, a boast that may have held some interest two years ago).

It's still a good value suite of tools, and one that rightly has some long-standing followers. And what's more, given that it can easily be picked up for under £15 by shopping around, it's quite a bargain. That said, we'd recommend that you have a need for at least three of its functions before considering shelling out for it.

An accomplished set of tools of varying levels of use. The low price helps you forgive some of its flaws, though.