Review: Norton Utilities rides again

Love it or hate it, Symantec's Norton Utilities suite has its uses.

Way back in the early 80's when shoulder pads were big and hair was even bigger, Peter Norton launched the massively popular Norton Utilities collection for DOS PCs, which consisted of several simple yet life saving apps to fix, tweak and tune them.

Ask any DOS geek with grey hair about Norton UNDELETE and chances are that they'll wax lyrical for several minutes on how it saved their bacon on countless occasions. Now Norton Utilities is back, built with code obtained by Symantec via its acquisition of PC Tools.

Tweak n Tune

Norton Utilities consists of four key application areas which let you to optimise your PCs performance, check up on what its doing, and of course tweak under its hood using a whole bunch of tools to fiddle with administrator settings.

The first utility I tried was the "Clean Your Registry" widget which found several bazillion registry errors (which were mostly redundant, old or useless data). I clicked the "fix all errors" button and it continued to hoover, wash and scub my PCs battered registry.

With my registry now squeaky clean, I then fired up the "Defragment Registry" function. Being a part time PC reviewer and full time geek, I'm constantly throwing new programs on and off my PC. This sort of foolish behaviour results in all sorts of odds and sods kludging up the registry, which can become see legit registry entries becoming scattered, fragmented just like on a hard drive - making for slower performance. The Defragment Registry reckoned I could optimise my PCs Registry by a whopping 28 per cent. Who was I to argue?

If, like me, you have a swag of cool third party utilities installed, then there's a good chance that your PC can take forever to start up as these utilities all try to launch at once, ballooning out your PCs start-up time.

Norton Utilities allows you to manage which items start-up, shaving just under 20 seconds of my PC's bloated boot time – Nice!

Another source of s-l-o-w PC performance is the sheer number of Windows services running in the background that are simply not needed.

Most of these have cryptic names so folks like you and I have no idea what they are and if we can safely terminate them without giving our PCs a DIY cranial lobotomy.

Using Norton Utilities I was able to turn off all but a carefully selected set of recommended services with a single button click, or if I wanted more speed, I could switch to a set of minimal services. Either setting could be undone and resulted in my PC feeling significantly more nippy performance-wise.

The Defragment your Disk option however was bit of a letdown as it used the old and unbearably slow Windows Defragmenter that's already bundled with Windows. In the end I stuck to a third party defragmenter utility, but was pretty surprised that Nortons hadn't got this right.

Last but by no means least there is also a "Clean Your Disks," option that'll clean up traces of digital detritus clogging up your computer as well as your web browsing history (according to the specs, it'll work happily with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Netscape, and Mozilla).

There is a pile of monitoring tools including a Process Viewer which gives some useful information in plain English that Task Manager doesn't. Detailed reports about each process are also available for geek-kind. There's also a performance test tool that'll run a battery of tests to come up with an overall performance rating, which is really nifty as it can be used it to see if your computer really is running like a dog or if that new RAM you've installed really made a difference.

If performing PC maintenance gives you a dose of the squits, Norton Utilities is a good option that puts a friendly face on what can be an otherwise fiddly process. Here's hoping that the next iteration will have a better disk defrag option.

www.symantec.com
RRP$69.95