Norton SystemWorks 2004 Professional review: Norton SystemWorks 2004 Professional

Review summary
This year, Norton SystemWorks Professional has added a few new components, including a full edition of Norton Ghost 2004, a new benchmark and diagnostic tool, and a process viewer similar to the Windows Task Manager. Because it also includes Norton Utilities, new users won't go wrong with SystemWorks 2004 Professional as their basic utility package. But if you already own SystemWorks, this year's improvements just aren't enough to justify the $40 upgrade price, given that much of the package remains unchanged. And more-advanced users should instead buy Iolo Technologies' System Mechanic 4.0 Professional for tools that really get under the hood in Windows OSs without draining system resources.

Installing or reinstalling Norton SystemWorks 2004 Professional isn't easy and could be time-consuming. We first tried to upgrade from SystemWorks 2003 and lost all of our previous settings in the process. Next, we removed SystemWorks completely and chose the full installation. The SystemWorks uninstall worked without a problem; however, when we tried to create a profile name in the new Norton Password Manager utility, the program insisted the name--the same used during our partial installation--was a duplicate. After consulting Symantec, we edited the system registry to remove the prior installation information not removed during the standard SystemWorks uninstall process.

The main SystemWorks menu, which lets you choose among disk cleanup and repair utilities, is easy to navigate. A separate Options menu lets you control which utilities run in the background upon start-up and how each of these utilities behaves. Unfortunately, even after turning off all memory-resident utilities (Password Manager, Virus Auto-Protect, Smart Sweep, and so on), we found that SystemWorks continued to load several memory-hogging executables at start-up. To turn these off, we had to access the Startup file under Windows' System Configuration. Even then, one executable, SYMLCSVC, continues to run in the background whenever you boot your system. SYMLCSVC is part of a central licensing service designed to prevent software piracy. It serves no other purpose and can't be turned off unless you use a third-party memory manager.

Finally, SystemWorks 2004 Professional loads perceptibly slower than its predecessors. On several different computers and operating systems we tested informally, our loading times (without any of the package's utilities running in the background) were two to three times longer than SystemWorks 2003's.

SystemWorks continues to provide antivirus, disk-defragmentation, registry-repair, backup, and file-cleanup tools in its latest version. New to SystemWorks is Norton AntiVirus (NAV) 2004's ability to detect potential viral threats in compressed Windows 2000 and XP file archives--a welcome development. In addition, NAV now treats spyware and adware as it does viruses, allowing these programs to be quarantined or deleted. We're glad Norton has chosen to include this feature, but we find its implementation lacking. Some shareware applications come with a small spyware element, and utilities such as Lavasoft's Ad-aware let you quarantine individual elements while running the main program. NAV doesn't, meaning your shareware simply won't run.

This time around, SystemWorks includes Norton Password Manager (NPM) 2004, which stores address and credit card-related information. The utility automatically detects field types while browsing online and offers the personal information you've filled out in advance. For example, NPM stores and retrieves username and password fields used in applications and on Web sites and supplies them the next time you access the application or Web site. But, unlike other password managers, NPM caches usernames and passwords only as you enter them; these fields cannot be edited.. NPM stores its information under a series of user-defined, password-protected profiles.

SystemWorks 2004 Professional includes Norton Ghost 2004, a backup app that allows users to recover damaged files quickly and easily. There's also a new performance test that allows power users to benchmark the performance of their PC, and a Process Viewer, which diagnoses system conflicts or performance issues.

Phone support for SystemWorks remains excessively expensive: $29.95 per call or $2.95 per minute. As there's no weekend phone technical support, you'll have to plan all of your technical problems to occur between 5 a.m. and 6 p.m. PT, Monday through Friday. The online support is a little better: Symantec's support Web site supplies a host of free information about current viruses. Still, we think Symantec could afford to provide better support for its products.