2 stars (Not of the caliper it used to be.) - Norton Utilities, now known as Norton SystemWorks, used to be a great package. In the last few years, it has gotten extremely bloated. At Home, I use another package for this reason. At work we have faster processor computers with more memory than my computer at home does. However, each installation of Norton seems to be worse than the previous.
First, don't bother using Norton GoBack at all if you've got Windows XP. It doesn't do much more than Windows XP System Restore, and it seriously bogs down your system on start-up. For example: One computer we literally would hit Ctrl-Shift-ESC and it took 30 seconds for the Task Manager to come up. Uninstalling the GoBack part of Norton, and the system was back to regular speed. A second computer, the login took 5 minutes (no exaggeration), upon uninstalling GoBack, the login took 1 minute.
The anti-spyware portion doesn't pick up much, either. I pick up several items with Adaware and Spybot that Norton won't pick up.
Speed Disk and the System Cleanup tools still work nicely. Mostly everything else is useless or just slows down your system to the point of making it pretty slow and useless, which defeats the whole purpose of owning a computer optimizing tool.
3 stars (Slow but sufficient.) - I remember being blown away with how great some of the first Systemworks programs were. They cleaned up the computer, protected from viruses, everything you needed. Systemworks 2006 seems to do an adequate job, but at the price of dogging your system down unbelievably. Full virus scans take a long time no matter what program you use, but SW2006 has been taking well over two hours every time. As for its spyware protection, it has yet to detect anything on my hard-drive, but Ad-Aware (free download) always picks up about 10-20 immediately after the Norton Scan. The worst feature is the System Doctor which is supposed to constantly monitor your computer for problems which might slow down or crash your system. Ironically, what System Doctor does best is slow down and crash your system. Immediately after installing SW2006, just disable System Doctor. You'll be much happier.
On the plus side, however, the utilities, anti-virus, and live update are usually pretty good. The "One button checkup" [which now takes 3 clicks to use :)] gives a good once over of your system and does seem to fix things that are wrong. Live Update does a good job of keeping your software current, and updates and improvements come around several times a week. Besides all that, you really can't beat the price for all the programs you're getting, even if you'll wind up disabling or not using several of them. I hope some of the size and speed issues are adressed in Systemworks 2007, but until then, 2006 seems to be working just fine. |
