Customer Reviews

Norton Utilities 14.5 1-User/3PC [Old Version]

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

If you are using Windows 7, this product WILL make your computer crash and require a FULL system recovery if you use the "Defrag Your Registry" feature.
I build, repair and maintain computers for quite a few clients. I have always recommended Norton Utilities. I know the product inside out. Trust me, you will REGRET using this product with Windows 7. Your computer WILL crash. Furthermore, Norton customer support is in TOTAL denial about this issue. Do NOT use it. Your computer WILL crash.
ANOTHER problem is: Even though there is no firewall in this product, the moment you install it, you will no longer be able to use the "Remote Assistance" feature in the maintainance folder of your Windows 7 Comp,. You will also not be able to use remote assistance that comes with Windows Live Messenger. Norton denies it, but I have done countless tests with countless users. When it is uninstalled, I can use remote assistance. When I reinstall it, you can NOT. What a pathetic product.
Norton should be ashamed of themselves to send this product to market.

I also got the blue screen of death on my desk top on windows 7 after trying to suppress my registry. I had to restore the system from my Recovery Disk. DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT FOR WINDOWS 7

My brand new laptop got the BSOD after installing and using this product. DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT use registry repair/clean-up/fix,etc type software.
Norton utilities ruined my once perfect laptop and symantec provided ZERO help over the situation. I was on the phone with them for over an hour, and finally the guy says "We're really not qualified to help with these types of problems" - !!!!!!!

Reviews done at PC Magazine (professional reviewers) have shown that this product provides no benefit to your PC, and may in fact actually SLOW your computer down slightly.

It's a waste of money and a gimmick product aimed at nothing but trying to make money. It provides no real benefit to your computer system and may potentially harm your computing environment.

I feel cheated! I bought Norton Utilities specifically because I wanted a top quality, reliable disk degramenter. I guess I live in the past, because I used to love the defragmenter that Norton had back about 4 or 5 years ago. And I used to love and admire Norton back in the mid-80's, when they produced DOS products. Their business style was an example to the rest of the vendors in the marketplace.

My, how things have changed. I had checked the Norton site prior to buying, and ran down the list of features that Norton utilities had versus other products they sell. It clearly said it included a disk defragmenter. So, I bought it, installed, and, to my surprise, the disk defrag button is just a link to the Microsoft Disk Defragmenter. That is fraud, in my book. Nowhere in the product description do they tell you this. Nor does it specify it in the Norton website. Talk about bait and switch.

Here's what the product screen says for disk defragmenter:

"Launches the Windows Defragmenter utility designed to analyze and defrag your hard drives."

If I try to return the product, there are expenses and time waste, and I have to pay postage for my return. So, I ended up with a pretty expensive Register Optimizer, plus a few 1/2 baked miscellaneous utilities that duplicate other things I already have, such as items in Norton 360. (I have been getting more and more disenchanted with 360, by the way.)

Anyway, BUYER BEWARE! If you are looking for a disk defrag, forget Norton and Symantec --- it is not the right place to look.

Hard to imagine a product that can bring such misery at such at quick pace. Take a fully functioning computer and chose to "defrag the registry" and render it useless. Like others running Windows 7 this program can and will destroy your registry and make it unable to boot, furthermore it disallows you from using a restore point to undo the damage. Very few viruses or trojan horses are as successful as this product is at destroying a computer. I like the Norton antivirus products very much, this one however is worthy of a class action lawsuit. Norton simply needs to update product to not run "defrag registry" for windows 7 users. They know the problem exists . . .and don't seem to care.

Norton provide two other products, "Internet Security" and "360", the latter of which is basically Internet Security + Norton Utilities+Ghost. Internet Security is brilliant. I've tried McAfee and Kaspersky, neither of which currently come close to it's antivirus detection abilities, firewall and low system resource useage.

Utilities is mainly money for old rope - most of its tools are actually links to Windows own built-in tools. Of the rest, the free CCleaner does a brilliant job of cleaning the registry and removing all traces of various history trails (internet, MRU lists and so on). It's not as configurable as I would like, but is more transparent than Norton and it's never blue screened my computers (and I've had five so far over the years).

Finally, Norton simply employs Windows own defragmenter. I use Diskeeper for that - historically much faster than Windows own tools (Windows defragger used to take a day, where this does the job in minutes and can run continuously in the background with no appreciable knock on system resources). It costs a bit, but if you must have a defragger, this is the one to get. I wouldn't bother with Windows own. I don't know if it's still true, but Diskeeper used to be the company that provided Microsoft with its basic defragger tool - basically a crippled version of the real thing, what marketting people call "aspirational" (ie, it looks great on paper, but it doesn't yet or never will work).

The best buys, in my view, are Norton Internet Security 3-User licence, CCleaner (it's free!), Diskeeper and for backup of files onto a NAS, Memeo Backup Professional. I use Acronis True Image for image backups, but I find it unreliable (sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't).

Tip: Norton has a subscription renewal link in the software. It is often cheaper simply to buy a new licence (in a 50% off sale) than it is to renew the subscription. Shop around.

The interface was nice and led me to not think twice about accepting it's recommendations. But, should have read the reviews here first.

After hours of trying to avoid having to do a clean reinstall, I found a solution on the Norton website that worked for me. Hope this helps someone else.
http://community.norton.com/t5/Other-Norton-Products/Norton-Utilities-14-5-crashes-Windows-7-after-Registry-defrag/m-p/181359#M17051

The program is nice looking, but doesn't have many features that a light techie wouldn't already be able to replicate. And, it's not worth the possible hassle. If you can't resist, be sure to do a full backup and create your own system restore point. Norton said it was creating a restore point, but it didn't.

This product is worthless. The product is nothing but a traffic cop standing around and pointing to other software you already have on your computer. The defragger points to Diskeeper Lite. Do not waste your money.

One reviews opinion. This edition of Norton Utilities is more than junk. I have not tried the later editions. It has a go back feature for the registry. If you get this installed, and use some of its features for a few weeks, you will find their go back does not work. It will never happen. Also after installing Norton Utilities, I started having problems with Windows starting. It takes a very long time, to start the desk top. There is a very prolonged blue screen. Sometimes it is permanent and will not start. The only help was with Micosoft's system restore. I used Micosoft's system restore to go back in time as far as it would go. Now windows is working better. I do not have any way to prove it was a problem from Norton, but Windows was ok until the install of Norton. For me Norton Utilities is crash and burn.

I don't know why some are having so many problems, but this drastically improved my computer performance. I have windows vista on a dell laptop that is pushing on 4 years old. My computer was still working, but slow and it would get stuck trying to do updates. Internet was slow and just would not work sometimes. It took time going through all the steps, but it was easy and you pretty much just click a button, then wait, then click a button and repeat. After going through the whole process, everything was fixed and it literally runs better than when it was new. I shut it down to try to install the updates that had been piling up because it would get stuck. It went through 30 updates in only a few minutes. In the past it has taken hours for only a handful of updates. I'm glad it worked for me, but would be nervous if I had windows 7 based on other reviews.