Norton SystemWorks 2003 Review The Torch Has Been Passed Eric Grevstad
Mon 12/30/02 -- Times change. Symantec Corp.'s Norton SystemWorks is a bestselling product and longtime favorite. We reviewed last year's edition so favorably that we're quoted on the box of this year's. It still performs excellently, with many features Windows users will applaud. We no longer recommend it.
Why not? Because SystemWorks bundles what used to be Symantec's flagship product, Norton Utilities, with the anchor of its franchise today, Norton AntiVirus. And while disk-maintenance and file-recovery utilities are still nice to have, it's become far more important over the last two or three years to equip your PC with both virus protection and an online firewall against snoops and hackers.
But Symantec, whose business motto seems to match Microsoft's "Never sell 'em just one product when you can sell 'em two," refuses to merge firewall protection into its antivirus package as rivals McAfee and Trend Micro have. Instead, it bundles Norton AntiVirus and Norton Personal Firewall plus pop-up ad, privacy, and parental-access controls in the $70 Norton Internet Security 2003 suite -- which we happily reviewed a few weeks back, and which now makes Norton SystemWorks 2003 (also $70) the wrong choice.
Move Along, Nothing To See Here
Actually, the most damning thing we have to say about SystemWorks 2003 was said in our SystemWorks 2002 review 14 months ago: "The already outstanding Norton AntiVirus is impressively improved since last year, but Norton Utilities and Norton CleanSweep are virtually unchanged and showing their age."
Change "virtually" to "totally," and you've got the picture. Several of the classic Norton Utilities tools remain useful, such as Norton Disk Doctor to catch and repair post-crash or other hard-disk glitches and WinDoctor to tidy up Registry junk.
But others are ready for the retirement home: There's a Wipe Info secure file deleter, for instance, but it's a clumsy "arrange windows on screen and drag files from Explorer" tool compared to the integrated, right-click "Send to Incinerator" shortcut offered by Iolo Technologies' System Mechanic. And Norton CleanSweep is the last of the Windows 3.1-era uninstallers, marginally useful if you want to monitor the installation of a new program or tally and delete browser plug-ins but really no longer necessary for Windows XP.
Indeed, one of the few additions to SystemWorks 2003 puts another nail in CleanSweep's coffin -- it's a Web Tools menu that offers clean, categorized perusal and deletion of Web cookies and browser history and cache contents (along with a Connection Keep Alive utility that simulates Web traffic so dial-up Internet subscribers can leave their machines for a few minutes).
The Web tools are both handsome in design and handy in operation (if nothing else, they'll astound you with the volume of bits, pieces, and debris your PC accumulates in just a few minutes' Web surfing). They also, it seems painfully obvious, belong in the Norton Internet Security package alongside their online-related cousins.
Value for Money
On the positive side, the 2003 editions of both Norton SystemWorks and Norton Internet Security benefit from this year's refinements to the world-class Norton AntiVirus package, including detection of viruses in instant messaging as well as e-mail attachments and extra protection against malicious worms as well as scripts.
And SystemWorks still offers a smoothly integrated design, with formerly resource-hogging tools like Norton System Doctor no longer loaded by default and with menus friendly enough for the most technophobic tyro to navigate with ease. Perhaps best in this respect is the One-Button Checkup function that combines Registry cleanup, wasted-disk-space reclaiming, and virus-definition update into a painless preventative-maintenance measure.
Not integrated with the Symantec tools, but welcome nonetheless, is a limited edition of one of our all-time utility must-haves, Roxio's GoBack 3, whose hard-disk-image magic can roll back your entire system to its status before a virus attack, system crash, software installation disaster, or other uh-oh made the PC inoperable.
The bundled GoBack merely offers a list of restore points such as "10 minutes ago" or "2 hours ago," instead of letting you review or annotate an event history or rescue data files created between the recovery point and rollback as Roxio's full package does -- and it's less compelling now that Roxio's lowered the price of the latter to $30. Still, it's an improvement on Windows XP's own System Restore.
Even so, the underwhelming quality of Norton AntiVirus' partners in one bundle versus the solid success of its partners in the other makes Norton Internet Security 2003, not Norton SystemWorks 2003, our choice for one-stop utility shopping.
Yes, Symantec's Web site offers a partial remedy by adding Norton Personal Firewall to SystemWorks for only $10 more (total $80), but we think it's time to call a halt to the company's confusing, overlapping combinations and product-shufflings. Here's hoping that next year brings a return to what made Norton Utilities great, whether they name it Norton Utilities or SystemWorks or whatever -- one product, in one box, that answers all Windows users' maintenance and security needs. Nobody could do it better; it's time Symantec did it.
