Symantec NORTON SYSTEMWORKS 2002 95/98/W2K/WME/NT

Reviewed by: Razzmatazz

Duration of ownership:

Strengths: Excellent virus protection. Keeps system clean & healthy. Easy to use. Won't slow you down.

Weaknesses: None.

Overall Evaluation: SystemWorks2002 has been great on my laptop PC. (PII-266MHz, 192MB RAM, 8GB HDD, WinXP Pro.) It automatically downloads the latest virus signatures, and has caught several email-based viruses; disinfecting them and clearly reporting the source & virus type. The system utilities are great. I set it up to automatically run a total system check on Friday evenings. It scans the disk for viruses, fixes registry errors & broken links, AND IT CLEANS CLUTTER FROM MY HARD DISK SAVING ME ABOUT 1GB! I used to run out of hard disk space because of all the Internet clutter that automatically accumulated on my PC, but not anymore. This feature alone makes it worth owning! The Norton Utilities are nice. You can recover files if you accidentally "permanently" delete them. (I have.) You can also optimize your hard disk to run faster. I haven't used the Roxio "Go Back" utility because that functionality is built into Windows XP. Besides, SystemWorks seems to keep my PC (registry) healthier so that I haven't needed to restore my PC (registry settings) to an earlier state. I used to have to do that occasionally before loading SystemWorks. I'm not sure if there's a correlation. SystemWorks does not slowdown my PC, except perhaps a bit when it checks my incoming emails for viruses. But that's normal. Checking files for viruses is work. It's so easy to use that I just bought another copy for my computer-illiterate parents-- for whom I am tech support!