why is norton bad??

bigdoug

Registered
i've heard from alot of people that norton utilities is bad for os X users. why is this? i have ran norton a few times and repaired problems. is there anythign i can do to reservse any affects norton may have caused?

doug
 
It has been known to sometimes cause problems to the Macintosh disk format and also some minor Macintosh issues. I see no need for it because there are no viruses for Mac and Macintosh problems can be repaired by repairing permissions from Disk Utility. If it has done nothing wrong to your Mac you should be fine. I just see no need for it.
 
Norton does not mix with OS X after Panther (OS X 10.3) and you should not, either. Symantec, the publisher of Norton SystemWorks, has announced more than a year back, that they will no longer develop this software for the Mac. If the software breaks because of a system upgrade, it will stay broken. Lots of people here have reported serious problems after using Norton SystemWorks.
If you have not had problems, then you do not have Panther or newer, or you are just lucky. If you want to stay lucky, don't install Norton, don't use Norton for any purpose (unless you need to prop up a table or other physical use :) ) , and move on to more useful repair software, such as TechToolPro, or DiskWarrior.
 
Generally, I see it like this. Norton provides a product that is supposedly supposed to get rid of all your computer problems: viruses, disk fragmentation, software uninstalls, registry cleanups, hard-drive bad sectors, and so on. These features are very valuable on Windows machines as Windows has ongoing, nagging problems with all of these things. Hence, Norton's is considered an "essential" product by many of its users in the Windows world.

On the Mac platform, the story is different. All of these things pose no real problems on a Mac - the design of the OS, with no registry, no uninstall process and no viruses, for instance - means that these sorts of problems that Norton is designed to deal with never really become problems.

The situation is made worse by the fact that on MacOSX, Nortons has been known to cause a wide variety of problems with disk integrity and compatibility, and as such is actually much more likely to cause problems than solve them.

Save your money and steer clear of Nortons. You're much better off spending the money on an effective backup strategy involving storing regular, comprehensive backups of your work in a safe location. After all, even Nortons can't help if your computer is stolen or destroyed, and anything else that goes wrong with it can usually be fixed with much less money down than what Nortons actually costs.
 
bigdoug said:
i've heard from alot of people that norton utilities is bad for os X users. why is this? i have ran norton a few times and repaired problems. is there anythign i can do to reservse any affects norton may have caused?

I would do an archive and install/preserve user and network settings. And, please never use Norton anything, including AV, on a Mac.
 
If norton utilitites is a problem in system 10.4 is there some other disk utilitiy program i should have or is Apple's disk utility sufficient?
 
Norton's is not a problem on 10.4, if you don't install or use it in any way.

A better choice is Tech Tool Pro, or DiskWarrior. In either case, check at the publisher's web site for compatibility with Tiger. I know that for DiskWarrior, an update specifically for 10.4 has already been announced at Alsoft.com

edit - forgot to proof before I sent :)
 
TechTool Pro 4.0.4 that was just released has been certified for use with Tiger. An interesting sidelight the size of the eDrive has increased from 4 GB to 5 GB because of the size of Tiger.
 
I am able to tell you that Norton does cause drive issues, I used it once in a while and it seemed like it worked. As I continued to use it I began to notice it seemed like more Major problems were occuring each time I would run it. So I would run it again,and it seem to fix those problems, so I thought. I would run it a couple days later to see if it found problems and it was worse. So my suggestion, get rid of Norton and use another like Disk Warrior or Tech Tools or like riccbhard said "use repair permissions in Disc Utility from your utilitys folder, just don't do a repair permissions from a OS disc
 
bigdoug said:
i've heard from alot of people that norton utilities is bad for os X users. why is this? i have ran norton a few times and repaired problems. is there anythign i can do to reservse any affects norton may have caused?

doug

I think Norton Utilities caused the very serious Kernal Panics that my G4 suffered a few months back. The repair shop figured the KPs were due to memory incompatability following a MacOS update. However, everything went pear-shaped immediately after running Norton DiskDoctor. A coincidence?

Either way I had a repair bill for EUR360 (USD460). Ouch.
 
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