Introduction

   It’s now a ritual: each new release of Windows brings a wave of new utilities designed to work with it. For months, Microsoft Windows XP has clearly held the attention of IT specialists and enthusiast users, many of them will upgrade to XP the day it’ll be released on October 25^th. Windows XP is clearly a major milestone for Microsoft but also for the whole software industry. As a result many software programs have to be rewritten so they can work with the new top notch operating system coming from Redmond.

Symantec the worldwide leader of ‘yellow branded’ utilities is back with a brand new collection of utilities that proudly sport the ‘2002’ and Windows XP logos. The famous Norton SystemWorks maintenance suite contains Norton AntiVirus 2002, Norton CleanSweep 2002, Norton Utilities 2002, and GoBack 3 from Roxio. This new release fully supports Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 98/98SE and Windows Me: a good point to be able to use Norton tools on every actual Windows 32bit platform. Norton SytemWorks 2002 has clearly evolved, but does this new release bring enough new features to justify the upgrade cost? We’ll review that in detail.

Installation

Once you have inserted the Norton SystemWorks 2002 CD in your PC, the autoplay box will appear and you’ll have to push the install button to start the setup program. It’s simple so everybody will be able to install it. The setup now uses the Windows Installer technology so the suite can get the coveted ‘Designed for Windows XP’ logo. Obviously you can customize the setup and choose which Norton applications you want to install. The more customizable application is Norton Utilities since you can choose which tools of Norton Utilities you want to install (for example many power users don’t want to install the Norton Protected Recycle bin so they can disable it). Once you’ve built your own setup preferences and defined your virus protection settings the install program will start and you’ll have the time to take a cup of coffee since it’s a tad bit long even with a 40x CD drive. Once the suite of tools is installed you have to register them over the Internet to activate your free LiveUpdate services for Norton AntiVirus. Now you can reboot your computer and you’re just a mouse click away to discover this new release of Norton SystemWorks 2002.

Norton SystemWorks 2002 Autoplay (click to enlarge)

Bootable CD

   The CD-Rom of Norton SystemWorks 2002 is bootable, like its predecessor so in case of emergency you can start your system with the CD (if your Bios supports bootable CDs) and launch the first rescue tools in order to repair your system and eradicate potential virueses. Only one bad point can be noticed when using the bootable CD: you can’t read NTFS hard drive contents with it.  

   Under Windows, you can choose to run some of the most used Norton tools directly from the CD without the need to install the full suite. For example before installing SystemWorks 2002 you can use the ‘Fast & Safe’ component of Norton CleanSweep 2002 to free up hard disk space! The other tools that can run without the need to install are: Norton WinDoctor, Norton Unerase, Norton Disk Doctor and Norton WipeInfo.

Norton SystemWorks 2002 Utilities that can be run from the CD (click to enlarge)