> From: bhodkin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Lets make things clearer so we can educate the non techies who are > watch > our debate. > if you have time, and i am not sure you do so no obligation on your > part, > will you document the issues you have with norton with more concrete > examples and also could you verify what disk warrior has done to fix > these > problems. i am interested to see results of what you and your tech > friends > deem norton such a joke.
I'm not Kyle, nor am I interested in starting a debate either, but I thought I would add my experiences to the tinderpile. I've been using Macs for about 15 years now, and Norton for almost as long. Unlike Kyle, I'm not going to promote DW by saying Norton is crap. But I *do* think DW is a superior utility and should be a part of your toolkit. Here's my Norton experiences: IIRC, it was Version 4 where things started to go seriously wrong (was that about the time Symantec bought NU?). Version 4.0 had serious problems that caused data loss and other irritations so bad that Norton had to issue a 4.01-4.02-4.03 in VERY quick succession. In my own personal experience, the problems mostly seemed to stem from the extensions Norton installed. Turning them off seemed to allow the program to do it's Disk Doctor and Speed Disk thing without incident (though of course you lose some recoverability of erased files when you turn the extensions off). Thereafter, it seemed like every time a new version for Mac came out, it was quickly followed by a warning from Norton not to use the .0 version but to use the .03 version. When version 5 came out the problems were so bad that there's a sticker ON THE BOX of my Norton 5.0 warning me to update to 5.03 before use. This is, I think, where a lot of Apple techs gave up on Norton as a reliable tool. By this point, Tech Tool was out, as was DiskWarrior, and none of them ever had these sorts of major issues that I can recall. Along came version 6 of Norton, right in the middle of the first wave of the transition to OS X. To their credit, this time Norton got 6.0.3 out in record time and strongly advised people to use it and it ALONE if you were attempting to fix an OS X volume. By this time I had moved to running Norton off the CD *only* rather than installing it on the hard drive. I didn't have any problems with it using it in this way, though I was noticing that DiskWarrior would catch minor errors Norton hadn't, or would change things back that Norton had changed. Finally version 7 came out. I hadn't upgraded since 5.0.3, had moved to OS X and was offered a good deal, so I upgraded. Again, running it off the CD caused no problems for me. But when I installed it -- HOO BOY! Weird quits, kernel panics, looooong shutdowns/startups -- almost identical to the sort of symptoms you might see if you installed some bad RAM on a machine. I uninstalled Norton but the problems didn't go away. Then I discovered (using Diabolitin) that a few "extensions" with the name "SymInit" or something like that (Symantec Initialisation) were still in there. Turning them off magically restored my system to full stability. Since then, I've used DiskWarrior/PlusOptimiser and the built-in system tools of OS X (such as Disk Utility and fsck) pretty much exclusively and completely without incident. I still have, and occasionally use, Norton Utilities (running off the CD) to diagnose friends' computers and to date it has done no harm in that capacity. But I no longer trust it as I once did, and continue to find that DW/PO is a better all-around tool. I do miss the "unerase" function from Norton, but I haven't needed it for many years and it never worked all that well to begin with. _Chas_ Moderator, rec.arts.drwho.moderated FAQ: http://www.otherleg.com/radwm-faq.html Charter & Styleguide: http://www.thecabal.org/~radwm/ Discussion group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/modish/ Quotefile nominations: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- The iMac List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | - Epson Stylus Color 580 Printers - new at $69 | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> iMac List info: <http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/imac-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
