Norton Utilities 14: An Overview

Many of the long time users of Microsoft operating systems, or their derivatives, remember back to a time when the name Peter Norton meant power. Power over the operating system and the quirks and mistakes that Microsoft had made.

The mistakes were quickly negotiated, allowing users to make their systems safer and easier to use, the quirks were explained, to everyone, to an extent that novices could take advantage without insulting the intelligence of those who knew a few things, yet probably were not experienced enough to make changes or repairs by themselves.

Most of the utility packages were written using assembly language, which is now a dirty word to those who write code, yet it led to remarkably useful utilities, that took a minimum of space on your drive, and did things that frequently saved your efforts, when you made a mistake. As the article on PC Magazine asserts, the beginning of the Utilities, was the Unerase program. It was a grand idea back then, as Microsoft, Digital, Novell, nor anyone else had thought to make this a possibility for the user. If you accidentally deleted a file, you were sunk.

Little by little, the Utilities grew, adding things to get around the problems that can still be seen with Microsoft operating systems, and by that, I mean things that are still not addressed within the OS, that Microsoft thinks you should not be able to do, yet force things like the Format & Reinstall if you don’t have them.

Well, forget that, because these are not those Norton Utilities. Long gone are the days when the package does anything other than call up parts of what Microsoft already puts in, and also gone are the days of any innovation, where a program does something that Microsoft did not think of, or does not want done (those of you familiar with the old Utilities know that nothing was designed to be malicious, but did powerful things, to help the imperiled user).

These Utilities are watered down, mostly available elsewhere, and not worth the money asked (though many might argue that the asking price is better than what it had been in years, remember that the older versions frequently bundled backup, quality defragmenting, and benchmarking applications).

The real Norton Utilities died, about the time that its main competitor, PC Tools (again, no, not that PC Tools) from Central Point Software was purchased by the behemoth Symantec. Symantec and Microsoft run parallel courses. That is, they frequently acquire rather than innovate, and in the process ruin a great package purchased (remember Giant Software’s Antispyware? It became the impotent Windows Defender.)

As the song (again, for older users) ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again” swells in the background, I can say that these are Utilities that are only really useful to the Symantec bottom line. Innovation these days usually comes in utilities with single purpose, and from small unknown writers, and the user is left to assemble a working group on their own.

Pass. (for those using, or planning on using Windows XP for the foreseeable future, you could try to obtain a copy of the 2003 version of Norton Utilities, which was still watered down, but not so much as to obliterate the flavor of what once was)

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Quote of the Day:

I’ll note you in my book of memory.
–William Shakespeare