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| Norton SystemWorks for Macintosh 2.0 | |
| Symantec’s
release of SystemWorks 2.0 for the Macintosh upgrades its two major Mac disk
maintenance products, Norton Utilities 7.0 and Symantec AntiVirus 7.0. It
also ships with three useful utilities — Retrospect Express, Aladdin Spring
Cleaning and DiskWarrior Recovery Edition. While the upgrade brings little
more than limited Mac OS X compatibility, it remains one of the more useful
Macintosh disk maintenance and virus protection utilities available.
Interestingly, the install CD contained different version numbers for Norton Utilities depending on whether you installed the Classic or OS X package. However, I didn’t isolate any differences in its feature set or performance. SystemWorks contains OS X compatible versions of Disk Doctor, FileSaver and UnErase. Disk Doctor is at the heart of the package and is used to check and repair errant hard drives. It includes a new Aqua interface, and performs parallel drive and data integrity checks, and fixes bundle bits, custom icon flags and document creation dates. UnErase is used to recover erroneously deleted files before they are written over by other files on your hard drive. If you take a “snapshot” of your hard drive’s contents using FileSaver, recovery chances are enhanced. These tools have been rewritten to work with OS X’s different method of handling system-based operations. One minor disappointment is the failure of Symantec to provide a Mac OS X compatible version of Speed Disk, the suite’s disk defragmentation and optimization tool. I don’t regard this omission as fatal, however, because it’s necessary to boot from a CD or alternative hard drive to perform optimization in any case. However, Symantec would increase the convenience of its software package if an OS X native version of Speed Disk were included. To test the software suite, I booted from the install CD into Mac OS 9 and ran virus checks, disk evaluations and optimized Classic and OS X hard drive volumes. Disk Doctor reported several “bad creation dates” for files on the OS 9 volume, and I was able to “fix all” with a single mouse click. However, when the same thing occurred with an OS X volume, the “fix all” button failed to work. I had to cancel out of the program. When examining a Mac OS X volume in X with Disk Doctor, however, the “fix all” command worked. Launching applications from the boot CD was frustrating at times. I experienced several random quits and a frozen computer when trying to launch Disk Doctor, AntiVirus and UnErase from the CD. However, a second effort at using these components didn’t cause any errors, although UnErase still booted slowly. Despite having to boot to Mac OS 9 to use several of Norton Utilities in OS X, SystemWorks and the third-party utilities remain diverse and indispensable tools for preventative maintenance, file recovery and back up of files on a Mac. Besides Disk Doctor and Speed Disk, Norton Utilities contains utilities to locate files, recover deleted files and rebuild a disk’s entire directory when you are unable to boot from that disk. With Aladdin’s Spring Cleaning, you can uninstall outdated applications, extensions, preferences and fonts, and repair problems with aliases. Backups to most removable media and external volumes is supported with the supplied Retrospect Express Backup from Dantz. Retrospect Express supports both Mac OS 9 and X, and permits volume restores in X, and backing up more than 70,000 files — a previous limitation. It also will back up to DVD-R and DVD-RW drives as long as you have Apple’s SuperDrive or a third-party DVD-R drive. This feature is important because DVD-R disks hold 4.7GB of information. With Alsoft’s DiskWarrior Recovery Edition, you can copy inaccessible files from a disk with a damaged directory to another, safe hard drive. DiskWarrior requires that you boot from the SystemWorks CD to commence recovery efforts. Recovery using DiskWarrior is usually appropriate when you are unable to recover the files using other file recovery utilities such as UnErase or Volume Recover. Finally, Norton AntiVirus 7.0.2 provides critical virus prevention and elimination in both Mac OS 9 and X environments. The Auto-Protect utility loads at boot time, and scans for viruses in external volumes and discs to prevent them from moving to your hard drive. Symantec provides a year of free updates to virus definition files from the Internet, and then charges for future downloads. |
Symantec Corp.
Price: $129.95; upgrades at $79.95 Reviewed by David A. Saraceno, a practicing attorney and operator of MotionLaw, a forensic animation consulting firm in Spokane, Wash. PROS CONS VERDICT |
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