norton systemworks/question 1

[occas]

i made a post, my first one, about my system being slow on startup. takes 4 or 5 minutes to load. i ran a chkdsk as advised. i never did try the recovery console/fixboot option. not lazy, just a little intimidated.

i have norton systemworks 2002 on my machine and it is due for renewal. while browsing for a place to purchase the 2003 or later version. i came across some interesting posts. several posts concerned norton systemworks causing machines to be slow starting.

my machine had no problem until one day i was downloading a page from microsoft.com. it froze all of my windows and i had really no choice(i knew of) but to go to start>shutdown. i had a problem with it doing that and a message from norton saying something about any data not saved would be lost. since then, when i shut down, i always get that same display. it didn't do it before.

makes me wonder if norton is the culprit. i figure i can purchase the new norton systemworks and uninstall the old one. after uninstalling, i can start up with no norton on the machine and maybe see if that is the culprit.

but i am curious as to whether i should just buy the virus protector and not worry about those extra utilities. any comments, tyvm.

 

[micker377]

I prefer Go-Back to System restore because of all the downloading and experimenting I do. System restore does just that - restores "system" properties. Go-Back restores the whole computer to a previous operating state.

 

[bcastner]

micker377,

I keep GoBack now on one of my machines for exactly the reason you state: I do a lot of experimentation, and need to revert the machine completely to a known state. But you would be surprised, as I was, how big a performance hit in normal startup and desktop tasks this feature requires.

GoBack offers superior features to the native System Restore and driver rollback features of XPk. At a tremendous performance hit.

Take it off temporarily and see how much fast your machine will be in normal desktop use: startup, context menus, everything. I decideded that the native tools were good enough for me, but you have to compare the before and after to appreciate my argument.

 

[jurgen36]

I do not use goback for the reasons stated by Bcastner. To restore my system to a previous state, I always make a complete backup with Ghost to another drive Array before I do any experimentation. If I find any problems I either boot from the other array or restore everything with Ghost. This works very well indeed and so far I had no problems. Incidently I timed my boot up time. From a cold start untill I can use Netscape it is exacty 20.04 seconds. So even with my HT EE 3.2 processor and Raid 0 arrays the gain agains Bcastner 22 second is negligable. Excuse my writing but the local time is 3.30 AM. Regards

Jurgen