Anyone using Norton Systemworks 2001?

[Mem]

Just wondering what do you think of this software product ,good & bad points are all welcome.

 

[Gatsby]

I have it installed now but find that its not a great program.

Sure it was cleansweap, antivirus and othe rsmall goodies but I find other programs more useful. IE my college version of AntiVirus.. No expiration, cleansweap.. BAH! I reformat enough and Speed Disk.. I have diskeeper.. like it more cause I can do stuff when its running.

Gatsby

 

[FOBSIDE]

how is norton ghost? have you tried it yet? has anyone?

 

[IamDavid]

Ghost is awsome. The rest of systemworks is OK. Bigtime resource hog though.

 

[Mday]

um, ghost is ghost. symantec never messed with it. it works great, though it's not the "full" blown ghost if you get it separate. the "full" blown version is the enterprise edition which is not appropriate unless you are an admin (of sorts). I have the enterprise version installed, but i don't use it. i still use the PE version i got from 2000, which is a DOS app.

i'd suggest getting systemworks if you want norton utilities and norton antivirus. sure they are not the best thing in the world, but you're running windows, which is not the best thing in the world either (far from it).

NU is a very useful package just to get windoctor, disk doctor (scandisk), speed disk (defrag). I rarely use the other programs included with NU. unerase is a must, though there are MUCH better recovery programs out there.

NAV speaks for itself.

cleansweep is great. i've used it for years, even before symantec bought it. although the interface is outdated. i run at high res, so, the fixed window size is annoying at hell.

--

also, i used msconfig and removed certain parts from loading at startup. the only thing i have that works at start up is NIS and NAV. NIS is not part of systemworks.

 

[FOBSIDE]

i remember norton anti-crash guard used to crash windows 98 more. how is the rest of norton utilities now with win2k?

for ghost, can you create a bootable image and place it on a cd?

 

[urbantechie]

I would never install all of System Works. I only install NAV2001NT and Speedisk.

 

[damocles]

I dont really rate it. Speed disk is cool, but you can get freeware progs that do the same stuff and dont consume as many system resources. The system optimisations/checkups are a bit of a joke imho

 

[setaanbomb]

I am quite satisfied with System Works 2001. I tried using the previous version of Norton Utilities with windows 2000 and it completely killed my PC everytime I tried to use it.

I am just now starting to learn to use Ghost and Anti-Virus is always running and works pretty well despite the fact that I can identify viruses on my own. I'll use cleansweep about every two weeks to clear out any left over crap from removed software.

I'd recommend using System Works 2001, I can't recommed buying it.

 

[FOBSIDE]

how is clean sweep? is it really effective in removing excess files?

 

[Floyd]

Suppose I'll chime in here...I agree with what everyone else is saying, essentially the only two useful features are SpeedDisk and AntiVirus. IMHO, the rest of them don't do anything that I cannot accomplish manually just as easily, and without a perpetual resource drain on the system.

And for some reason, I've had an astounding number of SystemWorks installations fail. I used to maintain a small office network consisting of Win95 & 98 workstations and around half of the NortSysWorks 2000 installations choked...in most cases I was able to install it by removing all Norton/Symantec files from the hard drive (including \Common Files) and tediously scrubbing the registry. Those I can perhaps attribute to prior sloppy installations, but the same thing has recently happened to standalone machines using the new SystemWorks 2001, be it Windows 98 or Windows 2000.

Therefore, it's not a bad idea to run a system backup before installing SystemWorks. Fortunately, the install routineautomatically creates backups of the registry and (if applicable) autoexec.bat and config.sys. But if the installation fails half way through and you can't subsequently install the whole thing, the uninstall will not work...in which case restore the registry and manually delete the program directories.

Best regards,
Floyd