Norton Utilities 4
By Finlay Dobbie

Warning: Norton DiskDoctor which shipped with lots of copies of NUM 4 has a SERIOUS bug in it. If you haven't already, download the updater from Symantec's Website!!!

In December I finally decided that I needed some decent disk utilities, so I added the Norton Utilities Bundle (NUM 4, NAV for Macintosh 5 and Symantec Suitcase) to my Christmas list. I have previously had several near misses with massive loss of data but I have normally been able to use a friend's copy of Norton 3.2 to help recover it. But since that wasn't compatible with Mac OS 8 when I upgraded, and it wasn't entirely legal, I thought it was time to get some protection.

Norton has always been the top utility for disk repair on the Mac. Maybe it was because it didn't have any competition. Notice the past tense. MicroMat has brought out TechTool Pro (version 2 of which is reviewed here) is the first real competitor for Norton. However, this review is of the Norton Utilities, so here's the analysis:-

Computer hard disks are spinning away continuously, often for periods of hours at a time. Nothing is perfect, so while hard disks are manufactured to top quality, they are still prone to errors every so often, mainly because of the pressure put on them. Let's face it, without a hard disk your computer wouldn't be much good, would it?

Sometimes the Mac OS adds to this, by making a minor error that causes it to lose track of all the files, until eventually there is so much wrong with the disk you find it can't open files, says files don't exist, etcetera.

At the heart of your hard disk is the catalog tree, which contains references to where all the files are stored. This can get corrupted and Norton can normally repair this problem quite well. I won't go into detail on the structures of disks, partially because I don't fully understand every aspect of it myself, and this is a review not a class on how your hard disk works.

Another reason you might lose data is if you accidentally delete the wrong file that is essential to your company's well-being when you're doing some housekeeping. Or maybe your two-year-old discovered that clicking the erase button made the computer make funny noises... All problems Norton Utilities sets out to fix.

The heart of Norton Utilities is Norton Disk Doctor, which carries out all the repair functions on your hard disk. It tries desperately to save all your data by trying to repair errors in the catalog tree and volume bitmap, it checks your hard disk for bad sectors and goes through every file to see if it has a damaged resource fork or one of its flags is incorrectly set.

New in version 4 is support for HFS+ drives (AKA Mac OS Extended Format in the Finder), something that was introduced into the Mac OS in version 8.1 about a year ago. The only other noticeable difference from 3.5 is the user interface, which has been overhauled and now runs multiple tasks at once in Disk Doctor.

There are also other utilities, including UnErase for file recovery and Volume Recover to try and recover accidentally erased drives or ones that are so far gone Disk Doctor can't repair them (you need to have been using FileSaver to back up directory information, though).

Speed Disk makes its usual appearance, with HFS+ support being the only difference that anybody seems to know about. Speed Disk is a defragmentation tool, which generally makes your hard disk run faster. This is because, as you write files to your disk, delete them, overwrite them again, install new programs, do things with your documents, the Mac OS fills up all the segments on the disk that haven't been used. This sometimes causes, for instance, 100K of your 1Mb QuickTime movie near the beginning of your disk, 500K in the middle and the remaining 400K nearer the end. The Mac OS has to juggle to read these, resulting in a minor slowdown. Speed Disk not only organises all the files into one piece, but also puts all files of the same type together on the disk (i.e. System files together, control panels together, applications together, documents together and all the free space together).

Norton CrashGuard tries to prevent crashes occurring and when they do it asks you whether you want to continue, try to fix the crash or quit the application. Fixing the crash practically never works and you can force quit using Command-Opt-Escape anyway. Some even say CrashGuard causes crashes... Not many points for this one.

Norton System Info is a strange addition: it tests your system's performance. One question: WHY? It's not particularly good, and the shareware MacBench does a much better job. Still, it works, and gives a percentage rating against the base PowerMac 6100 as the result of several tests.

Fast Find claims to be faster than the Mac OS find system but for me Sherlock wins hands down. Anyway, who can really be bothered to invest in a shareware utility to let you use it with Command-F from the Finder? Stick with Mac OS find-file, if you ask me.

Wipe Info is yet another strange addition. It is one of those utilities that writes over files you deleted with random gobbledegook or XXXs or something like that, which makes it unrecoverable by UnErase or similar utilities. Could be useful for keeping top-secret documents secret...

Norton Disk Editor is meant only as a last resort, as it can cause massive destruction to your hard disk if used incorrectly. It is included for use under the supervision of a Symantec support representative, who will guide you through the use of it step by step... Steer well clear...

Norton Disk Editor Lite d18 was chucked on the CD. It is strongly recommended that you don't use it, as it is still in the early development stage. It has been rumored that they included it to add new features that couldn't be implemented by the deadline for release, and thus were still in pre-release stages. Steer even clearer of it than the normal Disk Editor...

This Sofware has been awarded 4 MacoroniMarks out of 5

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