Steve Erbach
erbachs at gmail.com
Thu Mar 10 07:16:25 CST 2005
John, I've been using Norton SystemWorks Pro 2003 for about three years; ever since I bought 3 copies on Ebay for $6.45 each. I had heard some not-so-good things about Norton AV 2004 and its installation/registration/copy-protection scheme on Pournelle's site. Have you taken a look at Gibson's SpinRite 6. Good stuff, Maynard. Steve Erbach On Sat, 19 Feb 2005 12:22:55 -0600, John Bartow <john at winhaven.net> wrote: > Oops, I should've re-subjected this message. > > John B. > > I bought System Works Premier 2005 a couple months ago - it includes Ghost > 9. (BTW Symantec recently bought PowerQuest) Also Partition Magic is now a > Norton product but is not included in System Works. > > -One Button Checkup is improved and no longer causes lockups (Whew-who! Who > would've thought it would in the first place?!) > > -System Doctor (I don't use this resource hog) > > -Speed Disk seems the same. > > -Unerase Wizard seems the same. > > -Disk Doctor presents messages on start-up that most people would get a bit > nervous over. Such as "Disk 1 doesn't contain a valid bootable partition..." > and gives the option to fix it. I believe this is the age old conflict > between Partition Magic and Disk Doctor which you would have thought > Symantec would correct since they own both now. Also if you choose > automatically fix disk errors it tells you it can't do it until you reboot > and then that takes quite a while to do during boot up (I think it might use > XP's built in disk utilities anyway. Problem is that is does this regardless > if there are any errors to fix or not. If you don't check the automatically > fix it runs fine. If you have errors you then have to redo it and tell it to > fix on reboot. Logic is not included in this sequence. It should scan first > and if and only if it finds errors - inform you that it can't fix without > rebooting and ask if you wan to schedule the fix for the next reboot. > > -System Information seems the same. > > -Wipe Info seems the same. > > -Norton Registry Editor is gone. I used to use it because it had a find and > replace function and a nice bookmark function. > > -Password Manager (which now a separate product but integrates into > SystemWorks once installed-I got it free with my order) is a waste of time. > It works great at first but now it rarely does the fill-in for me and has > all my passwords encrypted so I can even manually type them it fails to do > it for me. Probably the result of some conflict with AV or some other > security product but my Google toolbar fill-in feature works all the time so > I don't think this is an acceptable excuse. > > -Norton Ghost (I forget now-who did they buy this from yet?) 9 can now read > Drive Image images. It seems that it is fast becoming Symantec's personal > backup product too. I wonder how this will stand given they just bought > Veritas. A tech at one of my subs recently mentioned that Ghost 9 doesn't > create bootable CDs. I haven't verified that but that may be a limitation. > (I believe in the past that you had to run Ghost from a floppy disk and it > loaded drivers that let you access a CD drive.) Ghost 9 includes Ghost 2003 > on the CD for Windows 9x, Me, NT, Linux and DOS. It can't read Drive Image > images. > > -Norton Cleanup basically replaces Clean Sweep (which they inherited when > they bought Quarterdeck) and Norton Web Cleanup includes tools to remove > cookies urls, cached files, temporary files and MRUs. You can figure it can > easily to not erase certain items. It no longer includes tools to cleanup > duplicates files, dlls, screensavers, fonts, and other assorted > collectables. > > -Norton Go Back (which they bought from Roxio) version 4 which look much > improved but I haven't installed yet because I didn't have room for its > stash area. (I recently added another hard drive so I will be able to > finally). I never much to complain about in the past version so unless they > "broke it" it should be fine. > > -Norton Anti-virus 2005 which is a very good product that I don't have > installed right now due to testing CA's EZ anti-virus. > > It includes a few Extras Features. Generally these are items that they > recently purchased, are thinking about purchasing or haven't figured out how > to incorporate into their UI. 2005 includes: System Optimizer _ basically a > "Windows Tweak" type of program; Process Viewer; Performance Test; > Connection Keep Alive; Check Diagnostics (from Smith Micro) for hardware > testing. (Most larger PC manufacturers have a derivation of this included > either on their system utilities CD or as a download anyway.) > > Norton Utilities seems to have been forgotten in Symantec's acquisition > frenzy. Vcom's System Utilities work much better as a replacement. However > the other components in System Works are all fine products with a few quirks > here and there. I do think they should include Partition Magic in the suite. > > John B.