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Review: Norton SystemWorks 3Reviewed By: Gary Coyne and Kirk Hiner Review Date: September 7, 2003
Remember when you bought your first Mac? Maybe you were working off the guidance of a friend, or perhaps you were lucky enough to get one at work. Maybe, miracle of miracles, a salesman at the local computer store was smart enough to recommend one to you. Regardless of how you entered the world of Macintosh computing, chances are that entry was made with a copy of Norton Utilities. It's a new century now, and Norton Utilities v8 is part of a package called Norton SystemWorks (NSW), which also includes Norton AntiVirus v9, Retrospect Express v5.0 and Aladdin Spring Cleaning v5.0.1 (and Aladdin's iClean). Because computers have become more complex, and because the internet has made computing less secure, Norton Utilities is no longer enough to keep your Mac happy. Symantec understands this, and they're ready to help you out. Curiously, you will notice that the requirements show that these programs will work for Mac OS 8.1 - 9.2+. If you are using a computer that cannot start from 9.2, you will need to start from some sort of boot disk before being able to run the Classic version of NSW. On the other hand, if you are running a computer that cannot run OS 9.2, consider treating yourself. Just a thought. The best news with NSW v3 is that you can now boot up in OS X off the CD to repair, defragment, recover files and/or deleted trash and/or wipe clean parts (or all) of your hard drive. What you cannot do is to check and/or remove viruses from the CD or access your drive(s). About a year ago, Gary reviewed Norton SystemWorks 2. This had OS X functioning programs, but you could not start up off the CD. Thus, you either repaired the OS while in OS 9 (Macs could boot into OS 9 way back then) or, if you had partitioned your hard drive into two (and had a system on both), you could repair the drive that wasn't the start-up volume.
By the way, here's an OS X hint from Gary: When you press the "Option" key wile starting a Mac that can boot up in either Mac OS 9 or OS X, you are presented with a window asking from which OS you want to start up and from which disk (assuming you have the choice of either OS and/or more than one disk). If you perform a standard CD start-up using the "C" key (to start up off of a CD), you will start using the OS you used last. If you have been using OS X, it is a bit easier to start up from OS 9 if you use this technique. Back to the review, if you have both Norton SystemWorks and Norton Internet Security installed, you can start any program from either package using the simple "Norton Launcher." 
This is Symantec's best attempt yet at integrating their various programs, making everything available to you in one clean window. If you do not have Norton Internet Security installed, Personal FireWall and Privacy Control are absent from the Security section. Otherwise all other applications/features belong to SystemWorks. When you start up your computer off the CD, you might be surprised to see that, as opposed to starting up in a Finder environment, you have started in the Norton Launcher. This is because, although Apple has licensed to various companies the ability of creating bootable drives, they have not licensed the Finder to anyone. However, once in the CD's Norton Launcher environment, you cannot access any of the drives on the computer. So, you can no longer save your repair report detailing all the things that were wrong with your computer, as was previously possible with Norton Utilities. You cannot save it to the CD (obviously) but you also cannot "see" any other drive from any window, so there is nowhere to save the report. Gary would like to see this limitation resolved, but Kirk never found it too terribly important to begin with. Norton UtilitiesDisk Doctor is still the driving force for people to want/need NSW. Disk Doctor seems to have mostly made some cosmetic changes; for example, Checking Media is now at the bottom of the stack and is turned off by default. You can check and do some limited repair with Disk Doctor on the startup drive, but we suggest you don't even bother. When Gary did this on his computer, he first received a message that his hard drive needed to be "stabilized." Then, during the drive check process, he received a warning that he had a variety of files all sharing the same sector. This is a very very bad thing, a virtual tug-of-war going on inside the computer. He dutifully restarted from the CD and, in this manner, Disk Doctor found no problems with his hard drive...no conjoined files. Much worry for naught. Kirk, on the other hand, didn't receive such a drastic error message when running Disk Doctor from the boot disk, but the program would occasionally bail on him, stating that it encountered an unrecoverable disk error and couldn't complete the repair. When each of us ran Norton Disk Doctor via the CD, it did a fine job of finding and repairing problems. The long and short of it is simply do not bother to run Norton on the startup drive for anything other than, say, UnErase. It should also be noted that the Norton Disk Doctor method of finding and repairing errors is still not 100% effective. When Kirk ran the program an older iMac that hadn't been checked in a while, SystemWorks was unable to eliminate all of the problems, leaving behind mainly catalog B-tree errors. A lengthy run of Alsoft's Disk Warrior, however, eliminated the problem. This doesn't mean that Disk Warrior is better, as Norton Disk Doctor can handle many things that Disk Warrior can't. If possible, it's a good idea to have both programs at your disposal. When you start NSW off the CD, one of the programs missing from the Program Launcher is Norton AntiVirus as you can now only run AntiVirus from the startup disk. For a thorough review of Norton AntiVirus, read Gary's review of Norton Internet Security. AnitVirus now ships with both NSW and Norton Internet Security, so you're covered either way. Speed Disk is designed to defragment your hard drive. There has been much discussion as of late as to whether defragmenting a hard drive is necessary. Gary's results showed him that, at a minimum, it can't hurt. Kirk would still do it regardless, as the gaping holes left by installing and uninstalling many copies of review software has often left his system unstable and somewhat slower in the past (albeit less so in Mac OS X), and Speed Disk has improved that stability and speed every time. For those who are unfamiliar with fragmentation, the problem comes when you are writing the great American novel, let's call it "A" for short. As you write the first 30 pages and save them on your hard drive, there are regions on the drive called "sectors." Each sector can only hold so much, and then the information is spilled into the next sector. If there is less information than can fill a whole sector, no other information can be placed in that sector. After saving the first bunch of pages of your novel, the sectors are filled as such AAA—however, many sectors are needed to save what you've done on your book. Now, let's say you just got a new digital camera and want to save pictures in your book, so you load the new pictures into your computer. The next set of sectors will now be filled with the images: JJJJ. You then write some more of your book, and it now looks like this AAAJJJJA. Then you realize you need to take one of your images, fix it up in Photoshop, save it, and copy and paste it into your book. Now your sectors look like this: AAAJJJJAPPA. Every time there is a skip in your book, the heads of the hard drive need to skip around a bit to find all the data. While this is not a big deal most of the time, it can be the smaller your hard drive is and/or the amount of "stuff" you have on your hard drive. Gary's wife has a TiBook with only a 10GB HD. It was filled to about 80% capacity, and she was complaining of how long it was taking to start up and shut down. Despite the Speed Disk only claiming that 0.3% was fragmented, it also identified that the directory was fragmented (even when the percentage of fragmentation is very low, which it usually will be, it can still cause problems). In short, running Speed Disk made considerable difference on her computer, which is now starting up and shutting down significantly faster. Gary has a 60GB hard drive in his tower, partitioned into 50 and 10GB sections. His main partition is about 55% full. Speed Disk showed that only 0.1% of his data was fragmented. After running a full defragmentation, he can't say he's noticed any difference in his computer's performance. Still, that's what Speed Disk is for. Run it once every month or two, and the fragmentation will never get to the point where system speed and stability is hampered. Volume Recover has been given a big lift as well, with the ability to create Virtual Disks by detailing what it finds in the hard drive and comparing that to what the directory is claiming is on the hard drive. It mounts this virtual hard drive (now called "###") and, in semi-transparent text set at an angle across your screen, states "Explore Mode, Return to Volume Recover when done browsing." While in this state, if the original drive that you are examining did mount, it will be removed from the desktop while the Virtual Disk is mounted. You can view this disk to see if important files are there, and you can drag important files to other drives on your computer. If you found no missing files, you can also select "Rebuild Disk" and this new directory will be written to your questionable drive. If there are missing files, you can request that Norton "Search More." If you were just testing (as I was) and don't want anything to be done, you can select "Quit & Don't Save." Otherwise, FileSaver and Volume Recover work as they have in the past: what Norton does is take a "snapshot" of your entire hard drive (via FileSaver). This is done at scheduled times (set up in a Preference Pane by selecting your Control Panel and then clicking on the "Schedule" button). If you have this set and have been updating your profile consistently, you will have considerable success in recovering your data if you have a hard drive crash and need to use the Volume Recover. If you have limited hard drive space, such as Gary's wife does, it is much better to turn this off as it takes up too much space on a small hard drive; better to just depend on constant backups. Then again, the best thing you can possibly do to protect your data is perform constant backups. Norton creates the FileSaver volume(s) as hidden files. Using TinkerTool to make hidden files visible, we noticed there are two Norton volumes, both are around 82MB, one is created "today" and one is created "yesterday." Thus, to provide redundancy protection, Norton keeps the previous volume and replaces the oldest FileSaver volume. The volume is created at a scheduled time, and we noticed absolutely no slowdown or objectionable activity while the volume was being created. One of the limitations of UnErase in the past has been the number of files generated by software companies. Perhaps you've noticed that when you install programs like Photoshop, Painter, or the like, you will see literally thousands of files being placed on your hard drive. When you upgrade one of these programs and toss the previous version, you are likely to be tossing out thousands of files. So, if you toss a lone document that you later decide you want, you need to dig through thousands of documents looking for what you need. As a check, we started UnErase and it found 4,615 files that had poor to good potential recovery. To aid you in recovering the single file from such a large collection of files, Norton has improved the filtering considerably. 
The main limitation we found is that although the actual filtering is very fast, if you wish to redo the filtering, it can take quite a bit of time to recreate the original "found" list. Norton should create a cache of the found list to expedite this part of the process. The Bundled ProgramsThe bundled programs with NSW are the same as before: Retrospect Express is for backing up your data on Zips, CDs, external hard drives...whatever you have—just not networks. You need the full version of Retrospect for that. Retrospect is a program that's been around for a long time and is fully developed. My biggest complaint with it is that, if you are setting up for your first backup and configured it to record onto (say) Zip cartridges, but you actually meant to back up onto an external hard drive, you have to start from the beginning. While that may not sound so bad, it is when you are backing up multiple gigabytes of data and it takes almost 45 minutes for your hard drive to be scanned for data and an extra 15 minutes of selecting which files you wish to have backed up. Also, the set-up can be annoyingly complex, even for more simple back-ups, as if the the user interface was altered between this and the full versions. Taking away some of the capabilities in this express version is fine, but they should also take away some of the unneccesary complexity. Still, this is nothing that Symantec can fix. The other program bundled with SystemWorks is Aladdin's Spring Cleaning. Using Spring Cleaning, you can search your computer for orphaned files (e.g., such as preferences for games you tried and never kept), duplicate files, repair or remove orphaned aliases, find and remove empty folders, and examine and remove Internet Cache files and unwanted e-mail attachments. One of the niftier features of Spring Cleaning (especially if you find multiple copies of your novel) is Quick Compare. This lets you compare two text documents side by side (not spreadsheets or graphic images) and compare and look for differences between the two. Also bundled with Spring Cleaning is Aladdin's iClean which lets you further clean your browser's history files and cache collections, and examine and remove web cookies. Our long standing warning/complaint with both Spring Cleaning and iClean is that it is all too easy to remove files you should not be removing. While it's a good idea to perform these cleanings every once in a while, you do have to be very careful. Consider it sort of like cleaning the piles of papers on your desk. If you just grab and toss, you are very likely to have some grief. On the other hand, if you go through them one by one, you are likely to find quite a lot of candidates to toss as well as some files you are glad you found. One of the disadvantages of today's very large hard drives is that they can hold many more files. But, just like an attic, the extra room has disadvantages and you do need to play "keep and toss" every once in a while. Spring Cleaning (and iClean) both can help considerably in this endevor, but you have to be careful. Gary's main complaint with NSW is that it creates a folder in your applications folder. This hasn't been a problem so far, but it makes "Root" the owner of that folder. We know Gary can regain ownership of the folder with a program such as Batchmod, but we're not sure what the consequences of doing that are. Did Symantec do this to prevent users from moving files away from where the Norton Launcher expects to see them, or is the folder owned by root necessary to make things work the way they want them to work? Kirk's only major complaint is that SystemWorks 3 appears to be much slower than its predecessor; examining and repairing his 60GB hard drive now takes nearly twice as long. However, this speed decrease has been offset by the fact that SystemWorks 3 has yet to abandon a repair midway through, as SystemWorks 2 often did. Norton Utilities has developed well over the years. The last several iterations of Utilities have proven to be strong, dependable sets of programs that deliver on what they promise. The bundled programs with Utilities and AntiVirus are good, but not extensive. Remember, Gary's review of Norton AntiVirus is found in his review of Norton Internet Securities. A final word of caution: Just because your computer seems to be working fine, that doesn't mean there isn't data and/or performance corruption waiting to rear its ugly head. Whether you elect to get Norton or one of the other repair programs (or more than one), do get at least one. Preventive maintenance is as important as the data on your computer.
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When you insert the NSW CD, you may be surprised to see two icons load up on your desktop; one for OS 9 and one for OS X. Symantec did a multi-session burn on the CD, so there are two icons. If you have a "busy" Finder like Gary does, you may mistakenly double click the wrong one and be wondering why Symantec didn't provide the OS you want. Kirk tends to be more fastidious with his desktop, however, and didn't mind the dual icons. Just make sure you have Classic set to warn you before starting so you don't have suffer through an entire OS 9 boot.