The thought of having something as complex as a computer without having any tools to perform general repairs and maintenance is like driving your car for 100,000 miles and never bothering about changing oil--it's just wrong. Even if you must depend upon your kids or someone down the street to check your computer, do it! General repairs and tune-ups on your computer will save you enormous amount of time and grief during those special times when a project is due in an hour or two and your computer is not working now. (And it always happens when a project is due in an hour or two--don't ya know...)

Symantec did a nifty thing when they created SystemWorks for the Macintosh. In short, it's a great bargain. Norton's SystemWorks gives you Norton Utilities, Norton AntiVirus, Retrospect Express, Aladdin's Spring Cleaning, and Alsoft's DiskWarrior RE (Recovery Edition). When you consider that separately Norton Utilities is $99.99 and Norton Antivirus is $89.95 ($69.95 with promo offer), SystemWorks is a great bargain.

The main programs in the set are of course Norton Utilities and Norton AntiVirus. There are two versions of both programs provided on the CD, one for Mac System 8.1-9.X and a separate one for X.1+. The CD has System 9.2 on it, as it is a startup CD, and can be used for repairing your computer in System 9 (the bulk of repairs required for OS X are completely covered within the repairs done within OS 9). The Norton Utilities provided for OS 9 is no different than what was provided in SystemWorks 1: version 6. Specifically on this CD is the updated version: 6.0.3. This is the version that didn't have fits because you had two System folders on your hard drive, even if one of them was OS 9 and the other one was OS X. New For SystemWorks 2 is Norton Utilities 7 which is now OS X native.

When SystemWorks 2 was originally released, the main difference between version 6 and version 7 of NU is that the newer version didn't have Speed Disk, the component used to defragment and optimize your hard drive. The reason for this was rather interesting: while the defragmenting of files is necessary, the optimization of files (where files are placed on a hard drive for optimum seek/find of the spinning hard drive) for OS 9 has nothing to do with what is optimum for OS X. Thus, people were finding a major drop in performance after optimizing their hard drives in OS 9 and then running OS X. However, on July 9 Symantec released update 7.0.1 which brings back Speed Disk.

Now Speed Disk provides options when optimizing for a combined OS approach or exclusive for OS X. There are also special optimizations for multimedia, iPod, and other options seen to the right.

However, there's a catch: the version of Speed Disk that can do this is version 7.0.1, or the OS X version. The only way you can use this is from a hard drive that is running OS X and you cannot use the CD because that is OS 9 and will have Norton Speed Disk version 6.0.3. Thus, the only way you can use the new version of Speed Disk is if you have a partitioned hard drive and have OS X installed on both partitions--you can then use Norton's Utilities to have each partition repair the other. Hopefully, one of these days Symantec will be able to provide instructions on how to create and burn a bootable OS X CD and then you can create your own repair CDs with the latest version of the program.

Norton Disk Doctor is essentially no different from version 6 with the exception of some minor arrangement differences, ie. Checking Media is now located on the bottom of the list as opposed to the top of the list now used by Checking Partitions. In between is Checking Directories and Checking Files. Also, like version 6, Norton provides an "undo" file--I did not test how viable this was in performance; I created it and after my repairs were successfully completed, I deleted the file.

As always, Norton, like all Disk Repair programs, cannot perform any Directory Repair on the active disk. So, if you have SystemWorks sitting on your hard drive, while you can have it check for problems, you cannot have it make any major repair. This is comparable to a brain doctor being unable to perform major repair on his/herself. (If performing a self examination, it is important to not be doing anything else at the same time as Norton Disk Doctor is likely to provide a false error.)

You will find a few things missing in Norton Utilities version 7: gone is System Info, Wipe Info, Fast Find, and Volume Recover. While these still exist in the version 6 provided for OS 9, all that remains (and is shared for OS 9) for OS X is Norton disk Editor X, FileSaver, Norton Disk doctor, Norton Utilities, UnErase, and back again, Speed Disk. It remains to be seen if Symantec will spring any of these back on in subsequent updates of version 7 as they did with Speed Disk.

Norton AntiVirus has been considerably changed and is missing a variety of components from the OS 9 version. Gone is the option for automatically scanning removeable media. Instead, one can select a drive and manually select it for scanning.

And one can also select an individual file for scanning.

But also gone is the Safe Zone, a place where one can send all downloaded files and/or disks for automatic scanning. There are no specific controls for Auto-Protect, it's just on or off and self-repairing or not. That's it.

There is also no longer the ability to set Prevention Levels nor Alerts-- what you get is what you get.

The good news is that the number of viruses available for Mac is still astonishingly low. The vast majority of virus' are those accompanying either Word or Excel as macro-viruses. These are sufficiently prevalent that maintaining a vigilant deterrent against all viruses is still the wisest course of action. Be warned however, Norton AntiVirus for the Mac will not detect nor remove any Windows virus' you may get if you are running Windows on Virtual PC.

But SystemWorks wouldn't be system wide if it didn't have more, and it does. Probably the best "include" is Retrospect Express from Dantz (www.dantz.com). Although this is the bottom of the backup line for Dantz, it has more than enough backup power for most users. This is a full featured backup program. It is said that there are two kinds of computer users out there: "those who've had a major hard drive crash and lost all their data, and those who haven't had a major hard drive crash yet." Even if you routinely repair your hard drive, don't test beta software, and only use your computer on the 2nd Sunday of the month, a major hard drive crash is ALWAYS potentially lurking. Unless you can afford to lose every piece of data on your computer, you need to have some backup procedure. Here it's being given to you. Use it.

Also included on Norton SystemWorks is Alladin's Spring Cleaning (www.alladinsys.com) which also includes iClean (used to clean out your computer of cookies, web cache files, Internet history files, etc.). And, if you are one of those who wants to move your mouse as little distance as possible, you can also empty the trash from iClean as well.

Spring Cleaning is a very handy, very important program that is (still) way too easy to make big mistakes with. The goal of Spring Cleaning is to help you remove unnecessarily and/or unwanted files from your hard drive. This can be anything from multiple copies of Simple Text (you only need one) to the preference file for a game you downloaded, played once in 1996 and got rid of long ago. The full options sound very good (as can be seen in the Expert Mode (set in Spring Cleaning -> Expert/Standard mode):

• Access Monitor (searches for files last accessed)
• Alias Fixer (searches for broken alias')
• Document Finder (finds documents of the same type)
• Duplicates Finder (searches for duplicate and similar files)
• Empty Folder Finder (looks for folders with nothing in them)
• Fat App Slimmer (looks for fat binary applications)
• File Checker (looks for damaged files)
• Font Finder (looks for fonts in and out of your system)
• Help Finder (looks for stray help files left by programs)
• Internet Cache Finder (looks for cache, cookie, and history files created by browsers)
• MacUninstaller (looks for uninstallers that may not have self-removed themselves)
• Mail Cleaner (looks for Entourage, Eudora, and Outlook Express email attachments)
• Orphan Adopter (looks for files not associated with anything)
• Orphaned Pref Finder (looks for prefs of programs that don't reside on your HD anymore)
• Storage Items Finder (looks for items stored in Storage Folders).

This all sounds great, and can potentially recover significant amount of hard drive space, but there can be dangers lurking for the unaware.

For example, try something as innocuous as removing all folders with nothing in them. If you performed this Find and then arbitrarily deleted them, you will have problems with programs that create empty folders in the process of normal operations. For example, when you create a new web site in Adobe GoLive, seven empty folders are automatically created for each site. If you deleted any of these folders, you will have problems when you go to save something in one of them and have it not be there for use. Meanwhile in another test, 8868 files were found on my hard disk that satisfy the conditions of "No parent applications for these files could be found in the search locations." This included many many graphic files and such files as "ACSubstServlet.java." This file is buried 12 folders deep in my GoLive folder. I'm really not sure what this file is, what it could be for, and what its loss could do to GoLive. Do I want to remove it? I don't think so.

And therein lies the problem with Spring Cleaning. If you want to clean up your hard drive, it's probably the best thing out there to help you find such files. However, unless you really know what you are doing, the chance of inadvertently throwing out something important is rudely high. Fortunately, the program's format is similar to Sherlock with the files shown on the top half of the window and the complete path to each file is shown in the lower part. Command-r will show each (selected) file in the Finder. And while there are some capabilities of Undo, I'm not sure I want to trust the "possibility" of undoing something.

Regardless, hard drives are like garages, attics, and/or basements. We keep dumping things in there until it gets so bad we end up devoting a weekend to tearing it open and cleaning it out. Games of keep-or-toss are just as important on computers as they are at home. Spring Cleaning is a good tool to do this with, but be very very careful and only toss things out that you KNOW are safe to toss.

Lastly on the SystemWorks 2 CD is DiskWarrior RE. This is not the standard DiskWarrior program that so many swear by. This is not the DiskWarrior that has saved many a hard drive that seemed unsaveable. This is DiskWarrior Recovery Edition. A bizarre little program that does Alsoft (the creator of DiskWarrior (www.alsoft.com)) little good. What the full program of DiskWarrior does is to rebuild the hard drives directory from scratch as opposed to Norton which repairs the directory. While there are advantages to both, DiskWarrior has been able to get many a computer working that otherwise was dead in the water.

All DiskWarrior RE can do is to recover damaged and/or missing files or folders.It does this by moving the recovered file(s) and/or folder(s) to another location(s) and/or media. You will still need to repair the directory with Norton Disk Doctor, but the concept here is that Disk Doctor is more likely to damage the files from the damaged directory before recovery can be performed. But DiskWarrior RE will not remake and replace the directory as the regular DiskWarrior program will do. And besides, how do you know to use DiskWarrior RE to look for files that are missing unless you absolutely know they are gone. DiskWarrior RE is a dreadful mistake.

My advice is for you to get a copy of the real program of DiskWarrior and run it prior to Norton Disk Doctor.

In short, Symantec has much to offer here with SystemWorks 2, but until they can provide updates for Norton Utilities and Norton AntiVirus that can be used on a single hard drive via a CD, it has limited growth. Meanwhile, the inclusion of Retrospect Express is absolutely wonderful, the use of Spring Cleaning is a nice addition IF IT'S USED WITH EXTREME CAUTION, and DiskWarrior RE is just to weird to comment any more on. I consider SystemWorks 2 a great value despite the limitations of some of the components. Let's hope that Symantec can get past the limitations of updates very soon.

Available at the Applelinks Store

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