I have been using Norton Utilities ("NU") for 13 years, going back to the DOS-based Advanced Edition version 4.5. (Remember Peter Norton Computing, Inc.?) Actually, I think I owned earlier versions of the toolkit but I don't have the diskettes to prove it, I only have the venerable version 4.5 floppies gathering dust in a storage bin.
In this and a series of future articles I'll be covering each of the latest version of NU's components in depth. Keep in mind that NU 2001 version 5.0 runs on Windows 95, 98, Me, 2000, and NT 4. Today I'm covering the System Information component.
Before I get started, first a nod to my colleague Al Gordon, who put it so well in his TNPC #3.19 article on Norton SystemWorks and Windows 2000. I'm paraphrasing his advice here, "The trick during installation is to choose the Custom option so Norton installs everything (assuming you have the disk space), then reject all the options to run things automatically; all the tools are there for you to use when you need them but they're not running when you don't."
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