Product Reviews

For some years, Norton Utilities for Macintosh (NUM) was the only show in town. But, faced with improvements in Apple's free Disk First Aid, novel offerings from Alsoft in the form of DiskWarrior, and the blossoming of Micromat's TechTool Pro, Symantec must be feeling threatened. Version 6.0 now needs to rise to the challenges offered by Mac OS X, and outdo the competition.

This beta works quite well on volumes formatted for Mac OS X beta. It's the best tool for repairing such volumes, and the only tool for optimising and recovering them. However, we found that limitations in the beta meant the new tools wouldn't run under Mac OS X. Instead, it was necessary to switch back to Mac OS 9 to use them. It was hard to assess how effectively NUM would work on Mac OS X, because, with the current state of the beta, serious test problems tended to freeze the machine, preventing Mac OS X or OS 9 from starting up, and forcing re-installation. This appears to be a problem with Mac OS X beta, which should be resolved for the final release, by which time it will itself be finalised.

Volume Recover can now rebuild a volume's directories, just as Alsoft's DiskWarrior has been able to for well over a year. However, as with DiskWarrior, the volume to be fixed has to be unmounted, which means you have to start your Mac from a different volume (such as the NUM CD) and run Volume Recover from another volume. That's fine if your Mac can be started from the NUM CD, but once a few more new models emerge, their owners will have to buy special new startup CDs from Symantec. A better solution is needed.

Norton Disk Doctor has two other significant new features. The first is to rebuild the Desktop of a selected volume, instead

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of the traditional method of holding down the option and command keys during startup. Although very useful, it's hardly groundbreaking. The other feature is more innovative - a command to add a file to the Desktop. This is presumably so you don't have to rebuild the Desktop when only a few file types are playing up. Whether this will prove to be of much help in dealing with Desktop problems remains to be seen.

Speed Disk has a potentially useful enhancement: it can use external profiles. When NUM optimises a volume, it lays the files out on different sections of the disk, according to the type of file. Because different types of use work best with different layouts, NUM already gives you a choice of profiles, including 'optimised for multimedia' and 'CD-ROM mastering'. With version 6.0, you can add profiles from external files to extend the list of profiles. However, there seems to be no way to create profiles yourself, so it's uncertain how useful this feature will be.

No serious bugs were revealed during testing, but it was easy to confuse Disk Doctor. Performing a screenshot during its examination of a disk caused a discrepancy between the actual number of files on the volume before the screenshot, and the number recorded after the screenshot file had been saved. Disk Doctor wasn't smart enough to check the file creation time on the new file and spot what had happened, instead it came up with an uncertain error, but offered to fix it. This is worrying when you consider that Mac OS X, being Unix at heart, will routinely create and destroy files, and do all sorts of other things in the background. Maybe Disk Doctor running under Mac OS X will need to be a bit smarter if it's to be robust and reliable.

If this beta is anything to go by, Symantec has a struggle on its hands. It's still offering Norton Anti-Virus as a separate (although often bundled) product, while TechTool Pro has integrated virus protection and general utilities. Many of its key features, such as disk optimisation and directory rebuilding, require your Mac to be started from the NUM CD, which gets messy for those with newer Macs. And its file recovery remains useless unless the volume has been previously protected by NUM. This looks and feels like a minor revision, and not a strong response to the competition.