Symantec has been a name to be reckoned with in the utilities business for a good number of years now. The venerable Peter Norton series of utilities has garnered fame for both its usefulness and power; and SystemWorks continues the tradition.

Norton Antivirus is, as the name suggests, the antivirus part of SystemWorks; with all the modern features, like real-time file system protection, automatic updates and so forth. The upside of NAV is that most features have a very extensive level of customizability: for instance, real-time file system protection can be both a blessing and a curse, but if you tweak it properly, it becomes invaluable. I am referring to, for one, the auto-quarantine option: it will automatically disinfect, and if failed, quarantine infected files. Unfortunately, what this could result in is corrupted mailboxes in email software, for instance. NAV sees the mailbox file as being infected, quarantines it, and suddenly all your mail is gone. I ran into that situation a few times. On the other hand, if you set up the exclusions properly, you won't experience that, and then this feature is particularly useful. Live Update is also a very impressive feature, since it keeps NAV updated automatically, which is wonderful if you are trying to set up a zero-maintenance computer (example: parents, grandparents). Sadly, LiveUpdate is only free for a year; thereafter it costs $14.95 USD annually.

Norton Utilities might already be familiar to most readers, since it is one of the oldest, and most famous, utility products in the PC industry. Numerous other utilities have tried to compete with it, but they all sort of faded into oblivion, while NU continues to exist, and beyond that, adapt to the new PC landscape so as to deliver actually useful functions for each new OS that Microsoft pumps out. There is a variety of components included in NU, so I will discuss only the ones that I feel are most important, and ones that I use on my own system.

SpeedDisk is another utility that is vital. To my memory, it either did not exist back in early DOS days, or I never used it - I think it got added into NU as of version 6.0 or 7.0 - perhaps there was simply no reason to have it there earlier since hard drives were not big enough to really get fragmented. These days, even though NTFS made promises of a file system that doesn't fragment and so forth, it still does - and hence, a defragmenting utility is needed. There are several other options on the market, such as Diskeeper, but the intrinsic value of NU (even when viewed outside the SystemWorks box) is that it includes NDD, and Unerase (or Norton Protected Recycle Bin, as it is now known), and that simply makes it a more useful package.

So what does SpeedDisk do? Quite simple, really. Consider the following situation: you download a 1MB file from the Internet. It is written to your hard drive. Then you decide to delete the file, and instead, download a 2MB file. What happens now? The computer will not look at the hard drive and say "okay, there is a 1MB free block of space here, but I need a 2MB block, so I will go look elsewhere" - tape drives worked like that. What the computer will do instead is say "Okay, there's a 1MB block here, so let me fill it with half of the file, and I will write the other 1MB somewhere else, and I will make a mental note for myself about where I put the pieces". Of course, what that means is when it actually goes looking for the file, it has to spend time recollecting the pieces of it all over the hard drive, and since hard drives aren't too quick (they are still the slowest part of data exchange of any computer, because they are mostly mechanical), this increases the time needed to access the file, as opposed to if it were just one 1MB block. That is what SpeedDisk aims to resolve: it shuffles your files around to prevent this situation from happening.

These two utilities alone make the entire Norton Utilities suite worth owning, but there is a plethora of additional tools aimed at improving your computer’s performance and keeping it up to speed.

Last, but not least, is Norton CleanSweep. This program originally started off in the heyday of Windows 3.1 applications, when companies recognized the sudden need: applications could no longer just be “deleted”, since they left behind various traces in forms of DLL files, .INI file entries, and so forth. At the time, PC Magazine’s ZD Labs created a free utility that tracked installations and then just backtracked along the same route – InCtrl3. It worked quite well, but soon became obsolete, and could no longer keep up with the complexity of today’s applications; and that’s when professional tools like CleanSweep came in. “But why would I need it,” you say, “Doesn’t Windows XP already have an Add/Remove Programs dialog box?”; and you would be right to ask that. Indeed it does; but sadly, it doesn’t often (if ever) work as expected. To prove the point, try uninstalling a program: at least half of the times, if not more, at the minimum, the program’s directory won’t be removed, as well as some files inside it. In the past, I have known some other software by companies we shall leave unnamed, to “uninstall” themselves leaving a good 100MB of junk behind in the form of the actual application and its data files (so I’m not quite sure what the so-called “uninstall” performed, besides removing the Start Menu items). Here, CleanSweep has two functions: it can either automatically scan an application and attempt to determine what files belong to it and delete them, prompting you to be sure, or it can perform the installation of the program for you and monitor precisely what it does to your computer, so you can restore it to a prior state without any errors or omissions should you decide to uninstall the program later.

On a last note, a gamer might read this article and say, “okay, fine, so this application is great for my mother to keep her computer running well, but how can I, a hardcore gamer, benefit from features that are seemingly useless to me?” To that, I can say this: not even the most hardcore gamers are protected from viruses (and since Norton Antivirus can now scan instant message attachments, it makes the Internet experience even safer), and proactive action is MUCH better than retroactive action, especially if your stuff wasn’t backed up and your “retroactive action” is limited to hitting your table, your dog, or your little brother just because he happened to be beside you at the moment you realized your files were wiped out by some new concoction from Malaysia. Furthermore, keeping the hard disk optimized does two things: reduces seek time speeding up applications, and (admittedly, marginally, but still do) improves the life of the drive, since the heads have to seek less – pure mechanics. And GoBack can help you recover from that latest driver beta that you installed that made your Windows unbootable.

So there is a little something for everyone in Norton SystemWorks. I always respected Norton Utilities for being the best utility suite in its time, and it has matured to an even more impressive product that you should consider giving a spin to, whether you be a casual gamer, a home user, a hardcore gamer or anyone else using a computer, for that matter.