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When Utilities Attack

When utility suites go bad, watch out. Ironically, you might buy one of these programs to back up your vital system files, only to wish you had made such a backup before you installed it.

Consider the case of Roedy Green, a consultant in New Westminster, British Columbia. Green had been a fan of Norton Utilities and Norton SystemWorks for years, but when he installed SystemWorks 2001 on his Windows NT machine, what followed was a nightmare. The first time around, the installation proceeded without a hitch. Then, Green says, when he tried to run the program a second time, "nothing happened."

So he tried uninstalling, then reinstalling it. But now the program wouldn't install. Nor would it uninstall. "I tried maybe 10 or 20 times to uninstall it. I just couldn't believe that this thing wouldn't work." He eventually succeeded in getting SystemWorks installed. But first he had to manually remove every reference to Symantec from the Registry, then delete every Symantec .dll file.

Windoctor and Office 2000 Don't Mix

He has since managed to get SystemWorks running, but he is still having headaches with clients using it. For instance, under Windows 2000, the SystemWorks component WinDoctor reports a large number of problems if Office 2000 is installed. "Symantec admits that [WinDoctor] does this, and they say it's Office 2000's fault because it has a funny way of installing itself. Their suggestion was to tell WinDoctor to ignore these errors, which is an odd way to deal with this problem."

He has also encountered the same problems with the Symantec disk defragger that our tests found: "It kept restarting. I couldn't track down what it is that makes it keep restarting. One thing I did find that was causing it was LiveUpdate, [Symantec's] own updater application, which is rather embarrassing for them."

But Green still uses the program and will probably buy the next version as well. "I will certainly have a look at it, because they might have listened to my complaints. I think the problem (with this version) was testing, and pushing the product out to market before it was ready."