Symantec Norton Utilities 2009

Best Price:
If the name sounds familiar, it’s because Norton Utilities used to be an important brand for Symantec, but it waned in popularity and there hasn’t been a standalone version of the program since 2002. The name spent a few years hidden away as a set of features in Norton SystemWorks, a similar set of tools but aimed at techier users. But now Utilities is back in its own right, designed to help home users with older PCs bring their ailing machines back from the edge of obsolescence, without the need for elbow grease or a sophisticated knowledge of clean-up software and Windows tweaks.

Features:
As with many Norton products, if you had the energy and inclination, you could find at least some of the features on offer either already installed in Windows or available in free software downloads. But that isn’t really the point. If you’re happy to do these tasks yourself, this product isn’t aimed at you. Instead, if you’d rather buy a one-stop solution that’ll help streamline Windows and clean up some of the detritus that lingers on any well-used computer, you’ll find Utilities to be an effective, if expensive option.

Its main features clean your Registry, manage and clean the programs that start with Windows (hopefully making Windows load quicker), clean your disks of unnecessary clutter, and defragment them.

Performance:
There’s no denying that running even some of the more basic cleaning tools bundled in this program will give your PC a bit of a lift. If you’ve noticed that your machine has been getting a bit sluggish or takes longer and longer to boot up, this will help. However, what it won’t do is provide you with the kind of performance boost you’d expect if you got a new computer or formatted the hard disk and started again from scratch.

While it didn’t completely revitalise our test machine, which has been running hardware and software tests for a couple of years and was definitely in need of a good clean, it has gone some way to improving its performance.

Ease of use:
We suspect that people who want Norton Utilities – those less inclined to research free utility tools and more interested in a one-stop solution – will probably want a one-button clean-up. But Utilities doesn’t include this. Instead, you have to go through each feature and choose what you want to do.

The main benefit with Norton Utlities is that all the features are collected in a single interface and they are guaranteed to be compatible with each other. There’s also invaluable customer support if you get stuck. However, it would still be preferable to have a quick, general fix that could be applied without fuss.

Value for money:
We think just short of £40 is a lot to pay. Unlike security software, which you’re going to have running all the time, Norton Utilities will probably get irregular use with occasional clean-ups. To this end, it seems like quite a lot of money, doubly so when you realise that some of its features (defrag, for example) simply launch the Windows software
that you’ve already got. There’s also the lure of those free alternatives. They don’t come bundled in a handy suite like Utilities but £40 seems a lot to ask for something that, with a bit of software savvy, you could recreate for free.