Norton SystemWorks 2005 Premier - Single User [AntiVirus, Utilities, GoBack, Ghost, CheckIT] review:
4 stars (Runs off the CD.) - I've actually got 2003 pro,and 2001 Utilities,System Works is

an essential toolkit for Windows health.I am reluctant to install

it,as a PC tech I see a lot of problems & conflicts with Nortons

and it has a reputation of being difficult to remove.This is

not necessarily true,if the uninstall tool available @ Symantec

is used.However I run Works off the CD,with great results.Disk

Dr & Windows Dr are great tools,and have fixed 100% of the sick

systems they were utilised on.
3 stars (Belive the other reviews........) - Brief resume - 3 years as a Senior Systems Engineer for a multimillion dollar integration reseller in my area, 5 years as the Regional Systems Administrator for a billion dollar chemical company, and 6 months as the Lead Engineer for a multi-million dollar dot.com Internet directory website.



I needed a copy of Norton Ghost that would work within Windows and not resort to a reboot into DOS. I decided to go ahead and try this software, despite the scathing reviews.



After using previous versions of almost every Symantec problem with few problems (going literally back to DOS), this one exploded in my face. After uninstalling System Works Premier 2003 and installing this, Add/Remove Programs would still open, however I could no longer see anything listed. I received countless errors after Windows (2000) booted and launching any portion of the program suite resulted in errors / crashes.



Since I was trying to install this on a dedicated ghost system (that had absolutely nothing besides Windows 2000 & System Works 2003 fully updated) installed on it, I went ahead and formatted the drive again with Windows 2000 and installed System Works 2005. I've had no problems whatsoever at this point. The Windows version of Ghost runs slow, but everything worked exactly as advertised.



I'm a little conflicted on how to rate this software. I'm going with 3 stars because it absolutely exploded when I tried to "upgrade" from a previous version even though I uninstalled it, however once installed it worked as advertised. If I was a normal computer user hoping to upgrade their software, this would have turned into a service call requiring about a hundred and fifty dollars worth of work.



Bottom line - If you don't mind formatting your hard drive, installing windows then this software, it seems to work. Otherwise, expect a bill for triple it's price from your local rent-a-nerd to undo the catastrophic blunders it almost certainly will make when you install it.
1 stars (Garbageware Extraordinaire) - It's ironic that a primary component of this package is antivirus software. I've never had a virus trash my machine like this pig did.



I installed it and, of course, it wouldn't work. It claimed I had installed it too many times. That was on the first install right out of the box. So I had a nice chat with someone in India whom I could barely understand and after much transoceanic negotiations she was able to do something that let me install. If I had only known...



Anyway, everything installed and it has been diligently protecting me from evil people for about a month or so. I am using an old 5400 RPM 20GB boot drive, I bought a nice new (big) drive and I wanted to swap my boot drive over to that. So I thought I'd use Ghost to clone a new boot drive, exactly as the program was supposed to operate. But first, I thought I'd run the utilities to clean everything up before cloning. If you own this package and ever decide to do that, have a friend tie you in a chair until the urge passes. It went through everything and shrieked in horror... "Your partition tables (on several disks) contains serious errors. Shall I fix it for you"? Regretably, I said sure. It screwed everything up where I couldn't even boot. The system claimed nothing was bootable. After about several hours of dinking around with it, I removed every drive from the machine except the old 20GB and attempted to boot. It worked! Then I hooked the other (3) drives back up, one at a time, rebooting in between, and Win2K was able to figure out how to set everything right.



So now for cloning. Everything appeared to work fine until I tried to reboot using the new (cloned) disk. It seemed to go fine until time to load my personal settings and the like and it then ejected a message "Your system has no paging file... go in and fix it". Great. Except that it just hung with a black screen and no ability at all to do ANYTHING, much less fix the problem. Back to the old system. Internet search... found out how to fix that (it appeared to have to do with anti-piracy... more about that coming up). I finally got it to boot, come up all the way to my user account. Everything looked fine. And then the machine spontaneously rebooted. This happened several times, but once in a while it would make it all the way through. But then when rebooting later the same thing happened. So... everytime I reboot the system, it may or may not come up. It seems to be about 1 time in 4 that it comes up OK. Otherwise it hangs in this silly reboot loop.



I know the story is already long, and I'll try to shorten it. After about a day fooling with it, somewhere along the line it came up and said "Your Norton stuff wasn't activated properly". Aha!! The horrible thing is back on the anti-piracy binge. I found that when it actually got out of the reboot loop, I was able to uninstall Norton's garbage. And guess what... it fixed everything. Except that now I had no antivirus protection, and the only way to get it back is go back through the nice people over in India and try to get them to allow me to reconnect to something I bought and paid for.



So in the end, I wound up throwing a perfectly good weekend down the toilet fooling with this garbage, went back to my old 20 GB boot drive and everything (including, I hope, the antivirus stuff) seems to be working, although I'm still cleaning up various little messes. What a complete waste. I have no problem with the idea that Norton wishes to protect their intellectual (???) property from piracy. It's too bad they did it in a way that renders the product virtually useless to legitimate owners.



The moral to the story... I won't be buying anything from Symantec/Norton again.

Norton SystemWorks 2005 Premier - Single User [AntiVirus- Utilities- GoBack- Ghost- CheckIT] is the CD-ROM version. The full version can be purchased by clicking on the "CLICK HERE TO ORDER" button below for around  87.99USD.