Macworld Expo: Norton Utilities 5.0 and Norton AntiVirus 6.0

Symantec was showing Norton Utilities 5.0 and Norton AntiVirus 6.0. They won't be shipping for another month or so. The biggest news is that both products now have Live Updates. No more need to locate, download and install patches. Live Update does all the work for you. For Norton Utilities, this is combined with its new Live Repair feature. This means you no longer need to boot from a CD to do repairs. All fixes can be done from the normal startup drive. It can also now undo repairs (in case the somehow make things worse) and can do repairs on FireWire drives.

Norton AntiVirus is significantly faster when scanning and can repair boot blocks. It will also include the ability to detect major new viruses even if they seem restricted to the PC platform. Finally, the two products are integrated so that you can call NAV from within Norton Utilities.

There are more new features, but those were the ones that caught my eye. A couple of notes about Norton Utilities: (1) CrashGuard was dropped from this update; Symantec acknowledged that it never worked well in Mac OS 8.x and they have dumped it for now. It may return for Mac OS X. (2) An improved version of Norton Disk Editor "Lite" is included; it has HFS Plus support. Finally, support for SAM is now over. There will be no more SAM definitions files updates.