Product Reviews

Norton Utilities has long been an important application for Mac users. Rival collections of disk and file tools have come and gone, but Norton has remained a prominent part of the Mac landscape. Now Apple is steering us towards Mac OS X, Symantec has responded with a new, native version of its old favourite.

We say 'new', but there's little difference from version 6 of Norton Utilities, which was released for Classic versions of the Mac operating system last year. In fact, there are some features missing and some in unexpected places. Version 7.0 contains OS X-native versions of Norton mainstays Disk Doctor, FileSaver and UnErase. Disk Doctor is at the heart of the package and the one utility almost all users are going to need sooner or later, to check and repair errant hard drives.

If you've not used Disk Doctor for some time, you'll see a clean new Aqua interface, free of the animated frivolities of older releases. It can perform drive and data integrity checks in parallel, saving a lot of time particularly with today's multigigabyte drives. It can cope with the differences between OS X's file system and its predecessors, such as the use of full stops to indicate hidden files, Unicode file names and Unix's symbolic links.

Doctor in the house

Disk Doctor is a fussy old thing, agonising over relatively small features of the Mac file structure, many of which are likely to become obsolete when Apple moves OS X to a more open, Unix-based approach to file data. Fixing bundle bits, custom icon flags and document creation dates may be largely unnecessary (you can turn off these checks if you wish), but it's nice to know they're set correctly.

Norton has built its success on delivering peace of mind, and on its ability to repair a failed drive and let you recover documents. UnErase is also included in the bundle and allows you to recover files you've thrown away. This

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process is made more effective by the snapshot of your hard drive's contents that FileSaver maintains. Both tools have been rewritten to hook into OS X's very different way of handling system extensions and file operations. In the process, FileSaver's periodic checks of disk optimisation have been removed.

This is because Speed Disk, Norton's disk optimisation tool, isn't OS X compatible. Designed to improve disk access times, Speed Disk has remained a part of Norton despite the widespread availability of high-speed drives and storage capacities that make optimisation so time consuming.

Speed Disk 6.0.3 can be used in operating systems from Mac OS 8.1 to Mac OS 9, as can the other main Norton components: System Info, Fast Find, Volume Recover and Wipe Info. You can install these under those versions of the operating system, or use them when you boot up with the OS 9.2.1 emergency CD.

So even though you may buy this package to use with OS X, you'll still need to run OS 9 for half of its tools. For example, to use Volume Recover on a malfunctioning external drive, we had to restart using the emergency CD. This would make sense if the drive was a startup disk, but not for an external drive used solely for backups. We were also unable to get any of the OS 9 versions to run in OS X 10.1.3's Classic mode.

It's all a bit sloppy. There's no good reason why Symantec can't include a separate OS X emergency disc, or why it can't ship native versions of Volume Recover and Wipe Info, which are the only other tools you really need (Fast Find's search facility appears to have been added to UnErase). This 'half and half' approach might have been acceptable when OS X was in its infancy, but not now that it is Apple's default operating system.

Half baked

Worse still, Symantec is charging users the price of a full upgrade despite delivering OS X versions of fewer than half the utilities included. True, it has ported the most important and often-used tools, but we'd like to have seen a reduced price, or at least the offer of a free upgrade when the remaining utilities ship in OS X versions.

Norton Utilities has been the leading Mac disk and file recovery tool, but this disappointing interim OS X release could lose ground to rival products that fully support the new operating system.

Needs: OS X 10.1 (version 7.0), OS 8.1 to OS 9 (version 6.0.3), PowerPC G3 or later (except beige G3 and original PowerBook G3), 24Mb RAM, 10Mb hard drive space