Customer Reviews

Norton Utilities 2002

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I purchased Norton Utilities hoping that it would help speed up my system. After installing it, I went throught the one click system performance update. This feature is suppose to clean up your system registry and delete unnecessary files. After my system rebooting I couldn't get into any programs. I assumed that I did something wrong and went on Symantec's website (I had to use my computer at work.) Much to my surprise Symantec has virutally no technical support. All installation problems are "typically" listed in their search engine called KnowledgeWare. If you can't find resolution to your issue on KnowledgeWare you can leave a message on their bulletin board and a tech will get back to you. Before buying this product and do yourself a favor and check out their bulletin board. Their are hundreds of messages with people with systems in varing degrees of failures. The response that I received was "We are very sorry for your problems with Norton Utilties. Please restall your programs one by one. That should solve the issue." Instead I reinstalling 30+ programs, I was forced to call their tech support to see if there was any other way to resolve my problem. Symantec offers phone technical support only if you pay them an additional $25 per incident. On the phone the technician admitted that yes this was a common problem with the Utilities program. Sometimes it deletes important registry files and recommended never using it. Luckily we were able to restore a previous registry and my system came back up.

The bottom line is that this program has extremely dangerous functions that can destroy your system. The most disappointing result was Symantec failed to stand by their product. Even though they admitted the problem was caused by their program I could not receive a refund for technical support. I have sold Technology products for over 12 years and have never experienced the total lack of support from a company before. In my opinion, I would NOT purchase this product since there are many other competitors that sell similar products that will support the end user better if issues arise.

I too received the wrong product from Amazon, except I got mine in the mail, which was quickly resolved, although in retrospect, I should have just bought it at a local store. Oh well.

I use Windows 2000 Professional and a Mac, and having had experience with the Mac version of this product (which is great), I expected great things... Don't get me wrong, it's not a BAD piece of software, but neither is it great. And I would encourage only advanced users to dive into the product to utilize its more advanced features, as this software dives deeply into your operating system to fix/tweak things. The create boot disk is only Win98, so Win2K users, don't bother with that.

I also ran into conflicts and did some harm to my McAfee virus software by installing this, and was forced to reinstall it, and it still doesn't work properly without disabling a few things. The software by default installs a lot of stupid stuff you likely won't need or like (like a Norton-Protected recycle bin). You will definitely have to read the manual for this app, as the help will get you nowhere fast.

That being said, it does do a lot of things and provides some helpful diagnotstic information that Windows does not (but should.) The sad thing is that Microsfot should provide these types of tools with its operating system. Or at least sell its own variant of this so you can "trust" it (as much as you can trust any piece of MS software, that is).

Bottom line: good and valuable tool set for the price, but not recommended for novices. You could easily do some Very Bad Things to your computer, if you don't know what you're doing.

I donloaded Norton Utilities 2002 a week ago. The product I received was Norton AntiVirus 2002. As of today I still haven't got anywhere getting this corrected by Amazon!! Don't waste your money on this download!!

Buyer Beware!!

I bought this program, assuming from the "Designed for XP" sticker on the box that it was, in fact, compatible with XP. However, the disk scanner cannot access the NTFS filesystem, which allows full use of XP disk features, while XP is running - and the bootable disks don't support NTFS as well. So, you will spend good money for this utility, only to have it run the Windows scanner instead. Plus, the rescue disks are still written in DOS and don't work well with a non-DOS-based system like XP, and a number of the features only run on 98 or ME systems! This is not designed for XP - it is a program designed for Win98 and problematic with XP that someone happened to slap a sticker of approval on. It gets 2 stars because some of the other tools could be useful.

While this is still a decent product, they have removed a number of the utilities that were offered in earlier versions. When I asked Norton about this, their response was "You can uninstall the new version and reinstall the old one," which is like saying, "Oh, well, guess you wasted your money when you upgraded!" Norton claims to have taken away some utilities because they weren't being used. Hey, I used them, and I bet a lot of others did, too. All in all, I was very disappointed in the "upgrade" I bought.

I run Windows NT on a laptop that I use regularly, and it was running slow at times and I kept getting some strange error messages. I bought Norton Utilities 2002 to fix this up and it did just that. I've found, though, that if you keep the Norton Disk Doctor open and running to continuously monitor your system, it does slow things down a bit. However, if you just keep it closed, and run the utilities like Speed Disk and WinDoctor every now and then, it should keep everything on your system running smoothly. Also, note that the first time you run Speed Disk (essentially a disk defragmenter) it may take a while (it took me about an hour and half with with a Pentium III 466), but it doesn't take half as long after that first time. I think it was worth the money.

This is a great program to help keep your computer running smoothly. I've used this program for a while at home and it is a must-have at the office. The only problems was getting the download link from this site sent to me in a timely fashion. It took around 24 hours to get it; not the 30 minutes as suggested. And though thats not really a problem, most of us like to get what we paid for quickly. Specially on the internet, when it should be processed and sent fairly quickly. Other than that, it's an excellent program to find all sorts of problems with windows small and large. I SUGGEST using the system check first, then the optimizing wizard which will be followed by the speed disk automatically upon restarting. These 3 things are the most useful of this product. doing this will speed up the process alot quicker than not using optimization wizard. cheers, mate.

This new version of the popular line of appz on the Norton line is great for finding and fixing problems, defragmenting your hard drive and doing anything you want. Now with Windows XP support I say this is a great buy. Either upgrade from a past version or buy this new version. This is a great program.

Agreed, this version of Norton has fewer utilites than the previous incarnation. However, if you own a Windows XP machine, this is a MUST. It has an excellent disk defragger and scandisk (both things Windows has notoriously lacked). It also has WinDoctor, which fixes all those broken shortcuts & incorrect entries in system files that make programs crash after you've moved things around. Norton also seems to have fixed its AntiVirus program's problem with interfering with other PC functions.

I honestly thought these utility products were a waste of money until I got one, now I wish I had this product all along. I bought it to find and fix problems and that it does. My computer has not crashed since I loaded Norton.