The Program That Has Saved Me Tears
Written: Jun 25 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Excellent features, easy to use, easy to customize, easy to install.
Cons: extremely difficult to uninstall, some worthless features, expensive.
The Bottom Line: If you don't ever plan to uninstall it, then this is as close to perfect as any major disk utility/antivirus mix software on the market.
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| zoogelsnof's Full Review: Symantec Norton SystemWorks 2003 Professional Edit... |
I admit to being shocked by the generally poor reviews this program has received, for me personally it has been a lifesaver. I would like to do a feature-by-feature review, as it is hard to look at the package as a whole. Note, the following applies to my windows 2000 SP3 install.
Norton Anti-Virus: Widely accepted as the world’s greatest Anti-Virus software. Automatically scans all incoming and outgoing e-mails, incoming downloaded files, newly installed programs, or anything else that you put into your computer. Constantly updated with the excellent, “live-update” utility that downloads new virus definitions from the Internet weekly. It is true that it’s not perfect, I’ve gotten viruses before while this was installed on three separate occasions in the past six years or so, but I am a, “high risk” user who is constantly downloaded and uploading files, so it’s a risk I accept, and it catches viruses I’ve downloaded or that have been e-mailed to me on at least a weekly basis. There is also an excellent online resource center that has helped me to eliminate all three of the viruses that the virus software let in.
Norton Speed Disk: This is a largely worthless feature on windows 2000. Windows 2000 comes with an excellent defragmentation tool that works much more efficiently then speed disk.
Norton System Doctor: A fun toy that monitors any of about 60 different computer statistics from current CPU usage, to RAM utilization. I use it frequently to find out which piece of my system needs to be upgraded next by seeing what part of the computer redlines first during stress testing, a nice included toy.
Norton Un-erase Wizard: A great tool for getting back files deleted out of the recycle bin. It’s not 100% reliable, if the area where the file was located has been overwritten, it can’t recover the file, but it works a majority of the time.
Norton Disk Doctor: A good hardware diagnostic tool, basically a heavily upgraded version of Microsoft’s, “Scandisk.”
Norton Win Doctor: This program is worth almost the cost of the entire thing. It is a fantastic windows diagnostic tool, with excellent repair features. It checks every last nook and cranny of the machine. It does extensive registry checks for everything from Active-X controllers to missing fonts to incorrect shortcuts and everything in between. Often times I’ve had programs not run, used this utility, had it find several problems and fix them, and then the previously non-running program works like a charm. When I was a computer technician often times people would bring me machines with all levels of strange programs, I would run this utility, and it would fix better the 85% of them within 15 minutes. I can’t say enough good things about this utility.
System Information: A decent program that just shows your computers statistics (RAM, CPU, video card, etc)
Wipe Info: Unless you work for the government, odds are you don’t have anything important enough on your computer that you need to make sure it gets uber-deleted.
Norton Clean sweep: An utterly worthless program that actually has done more harm to me then good in being over-zealous in what it cleans up.
Norton Ghost: A solid backup utility.
Norton Go back: A lifesaving program. Not installed normally, but located in a separate folder on the CD, it keeps track of the status of your computer (every file on it, every word, every bit) at various save points, (4 hours ago, 12 hours ago, 1 day ago, 2 days ago, a week ago) and allows you to revert your hard drive to that point at any time, for any reason. This has saved my life when I accidentally mess up my registry and the computer won’t boot, or delete critical files that stop the OS from loading.
The only major problem with this program is uninstalling it. This isn’t a problem for me, because I love it so that I always keep it loaded. However, I have had to uninstall it before from other people’s machines and it can mess things up royally. If you install this program, you will most likely need to do an OS re-install in order to fully rid your machine of it.
Overall this is an excellent program, with largely excellent features that have, multiple times, saved me from hours of frustrating mind numbing tech support work.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
zoogelsnof
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Member: Zac Cramer
Location: Boston, Mass.
Reviews written: 48
Trusted by: 17 members
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