I’ve been using Norton products for many years now. The last one I bought outright was Norton System Works 2002, which was great. I’ve had that installed and running for four years. Each year I get prompted to renew my virus subscription, and paid whatever they were asking. Never had a virus, and overall I had no major problems with it, so I never bothered to upgrade.
This time around, though, I was unable to renew the virus subscription. Norton is no longer supporting System Works 2002. I’d have to upgrade Norton Antivirus to the latest version. The thing is, I’ve heard SO much bad news about Norton products in the last year or so. Seems like they have just kept forcing features into their products in order to justify a new version every year, and now they seem to do more harm than good.
So I started looking at other virus solutions. Finally settled on Avast antivirus. Personal version is free and seems to get pretty good reviews. Installed that successfully.
Then I started looking at the rest of the stuff that was in System Works 2002. All I ever used from it was the WinDoctor and SpeedDisk (defrag) utils. Actually, in the last few months, I noticed that WinDoctor was kind of useless. It kept coming up with errors that it could not fix. So I constantly had this growing list of unresolved issues. Yuck. I wound up buying Registry Mechanic, which repaired all of those errors and found literally hundreds of other issues that Norton didn’t find.
Today I just installed Diskeeper for defragging, which really kicks SpeedDisk’s butt. One cool thing it has is a boot-time defrag, which you can set to defrag system files that cannot be moved while the OS is running. It also has a smart schedule feature that monitors your disk and does a less intense defrag whenever things are getting a little messy. It supposedly monitors your usage too, so that it’s not tying up your cpu and disk with its work while you’re trying to do your work. So far it looks pretty good, but I’m a little wary of that. Anyway, if it does get in the way, I can disable that feature.
With all that going, I uninstalled and said goodbye to Norton. It’s kind of an interesting commentary on the software business. Marketing instists on new, groundbreaking features every year. Stuff that the competition is not doing, that nobody has ever done before. What gets left behind is good simple software that is easy to use and just does what it’s supposed to. I can already see Diskeeper going in that direction with the smart scheduling and some of the other advanced features. We’ll see.