Norton SystemWorks 2.0

Rating:
Summary: SystemWorks for Mac lives up to Windows Tradition -Yikes!
Review: Much like my experience with Norton SystemWorks for the PC, this product's installation immediately had drastically negative effects on my new iMac G4's performance. Everything seemed effected... mouse clicking, typing, web browsing, dragging & dropping, movement of/through through menus, scrolling through mailboxes... everything became excruciatingly slower. DVD playback which was perfect became choppy to the point of being unenjoyable. There were other problems too. DiskDoctor gave me "out of memory" errors during a routine scan of my HD (I have 512MB of RAM!). Essentially DiskDoctor could not complete all of its tasks unless I manually canceled all of the tasks except the one that I wanted to complete. This meant that the program had to be run 3-4 times just to do one complete scan. SpeedDisk also couldn't complete a HD defragmentation without errors, even after getting DiskDoctor to confirm that the disk was error free. Overall, this was a very disappointing product. Thankfully, when I dragged SystemWorks and all its associated folders and preferences to the trash and restarted my iMac all was back to normal. I guess I should have learned better than to purchase this product after my similar experiences on Windows PCs with earlier versions. Maybe it will be useful to keep around for emergencies, but keeping it installed is certainly not an option.. that is if I want to keep my system working!

Rating:
Summary: Don't Waste Your Money
Review: My sister had a problem with her internet connection. We installed an OS X Update. The computer wouldn't start up. We ran the Apple Disk Utility which found errors but couldn't repair them. Disk Doctor found a number of errors repaired them and the computer started up. Her network connection was working too. Well worth the money and not having to clean install.

Rating:
Summary: Repaired a hard drive that wouldn't start up
Review: My sister had a problem with her internet connection. We installed an OS X Update. The computer wouldn't start up. We ran the Apple Disk Utility which found errors but couldn't repair them. Disk Doctor found a number of errors repaired them and the computer started up. Her network connection was working too. Well worth the money and not having to clean install.

Rating:
Summary: No custom install for OS X
Review: Notice the one guy who recommends this product is using the PC version- and obviously rating in the wrong place (most PC people can't do anything right). I bought this product out of desperation because I accidentally trashed a bunch of files in OS 10.2 (thanks to a different program). Needless to say, recovery was impossible because Norton only starts up in OS 9 from the CD, and will not install the product in OS 10.2 unless it is going to the primary drive. So I installed it anyway, knowing my files were gone if I did, and must say that even Disk Doctor is a complete waste as it takes 8 hours to scan my hard drive, then tells me I have a bad disk sector- the only way I can fix it of course is to start up by CD (which is only OS 9), and run Disk Doctor again. Kind of useless when OS 9 can't repair the UNIX core! At least AntiVirus came with it- although I have not had a Mac virus for over 10 years! Wait for Tech Tool 4 to come out.

Rating:
Summary: Waste of Time and Money
Review: Notice the one guy who recommends this product is using the PC version- and obviously rating in the wrong place (most PC people can't do anything right). I bought this product out of desperation because I accidentally trashed a bunch of files in OS 10.2 (thanks to a different program). Needless to say, recovery was impossible because Norton only starts up in OS 9 from the CD, and will not install the product in OS 10.2 unless it is going to the primary drive. So I installed it anyway, knowing my files were gone if I did, and must say that even Disk Doctor is a complete waste as it takes 8 hours to scan my hard drive, then tells me I have a bad disk sector- the only way I can fix it of course is to start up by CD (which is only OS 9), and run Disk Doctor again. Kind of useless when OS 9 can't repair the UNIX core! At least AntiVirus came with it- although I have not had a Mac virus for over 10 years! Wait for Tech Tool 4 to come out.

Rating:
Summary: Not compatible with 10.3!!!!!
Review: The box says OS X 10.1.5 OR HIGHER. Wrong..
Does not work for 10.3 and will not until about Feb. according to Symantec tech support

Rating:
Summary: be careful
Review: This software almost wiped out my disk on my Mac OS X completely when I ran Disk Doctor. Fortunately, it was saved by Alsoft's Diskwarrior 3.0.

Rating:
Summary: Not a reliable utility
Review: While Norton seemed to work fine in OS 9, I had major problems with it messing up my system 10.1 in OS X. Now, I will ONLY use Norton for the disk optimization utility. For general system maintenance, I use Alsoft DiskWarrior, and that has been excellent. My system has NEVER totally crashed since I began using DiskWarrior monthly. Of course, many other things have changed, like OS X being updated to the different 10.1 and 10.2 updates, so it's hard to say EXACTLY what was the culprit... but still, my gut feeling about what was going down was that Norton hosed my Mac, and since using DiskWarrior regularly, my Mac has never been hosed. So at this point, I'm never running Norton Systemworks' Disk Doctor function again.