Norton System Works Premier on Vista 64

[Guest Howard Swope]

I recently purchased Norton System Works Premier 2008 to run on Vista 64.

 

Issues:

 

1. Save and Restore 2.0 originally listed itself as a 30 day trial. This was

very confusing. I spent a lot of time with tech support trying to figure it

out. I woke up the next morning and it had activated itself. I am not sure

how this occurred.

 

2. Norton System Doctor, part of Norton Utilities, will only read up to 4 GB

of RAM. All my other system tools show my full 8.

 

3. Norton System Doctor's live update monitor always shows me needing an

update even though I ran live update recently and had all updates.

 

4. Defragmenter tool interface is less than desirable.

 

Pros:

 

1. Cleaner interface

 

2. Antivirus seems less intrusive, more performant. (no real evidence to

back this up, just a feeling).

 

3. Save and Restore 2.0.

I now have my backups running the way that I want. I was not really

happy with the shadow copy stuff in windows. This tool is fairly versatile.

I haven't tested the restore (I really should do this).

 

Thoughts:

 

The new interface is much better than previous versions. I was at first

taken back by the simplistic interface. I am not a big fan of dumbed down

interfaces full of hyper links. I still can't figure out why everyone wants

to make software look like a web page and shove everything down port 80.

However, once I looked past my prejudice, I realized that this particular

interface was clean and elegantly simple. It is much better organized than

pervious versions. The protection center and antivirus integrated well

together. The other products bundled were not part of the integrated

interface. I would like to eventually see them integrated, but not until

they figure out how do do it correctly. I am glad they didn't force the

issue to soon.

 

Norton Utilities was clearly not given a lot of priority in this release.

The interface is getting old and tired. There were several things that are

broken and I have a message into tech support. They also completely

eliminated the drive map of the disk defragmenter. I was always found of the

map representing the different file fragments. I like to see them

rearranging themselves. Now there is just a progress bar. I am disappointed

in the utilities. This used to be Norton's bread and butter and the reason

why people even looked at their products. They really ought to spend the

time and bring old faithful back into the fold.