Overview

Norton Utilities is a collection of software tools to optimize your computer’s performance.  It allows you to free up disk space, manage startup items, enhance boot time, scan and fix errors in the registry and other performance options.

Walk Through Review

Installation – 7

Installing Norton Utilities is easy and straight forward following the Install Wizard but a couple of things to point out is being able to scan the registry when Windows starts.

When the installation and set up is complete it will run a Smart Update right away to get the latest improvements.

Features – 5

The utilities included with Norton Utilities do an adequate job, however there are not very many to choose from.  Free system utilities such as Glary Utilities offer more features than this.  You can access the different utilities through the main control panel.

Clean your hard drive to create more space in different categories such as Windows, Plug-ins, Browser histories, and other custom items.

Monitor your system processes, performance, drive space, and gather system information.  Here is also the option to defrag and optimize the hard drive.

A start up manager to select what programs do or don’t run during system startup.

The Windows Tools section is just another control panel to launch existing Windows utilities.

After doing a disk clean up or registry scan you can view a report of what was removed.

Ease of Use – 7

The user interface is clean and well organized making it easy to use.  As an example lets take a look at running a disk cleanup.  From the main menu click on Clean Your Disks.

Next choose the Windows directories, Browsers, free disk space, or custom items you want disk clean up to scan.

While the scan takes place a progress window will be displayed.

After the clean up has finished basic results will be displayed showing how much disk space has been gained.

Performance –7

Everything is easily accessed through the user friendly interface.  It is light on system resources.  All of the utilities performed their functions rather quickly.

You can run Smart Update to get the newest enhancements which should improve functionality and performance.

Conclusion

While the limited number of utilities included in this suite work the problem is there are so few utilities included.  Users would be better off using a freeware solution than pay the $49.99 required for a license.  The application is easy to use and is light on system resources does perform tasks very well.  Norton Utilities is compatible with Windows XP & Vista both 32 and 64 bit versions.  Norton needs to add much more functionality before  considering purchasing.

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Rating

• Installation: 7
• Ease of Use: 7
• Features: 5
• Performance: 7
• Product Support: 7