I would like to know what you all think of Norton Utilities. I recently added a stick of 256 ram and with my 128 I now have 384. This amount shows up everywhere as OK except for Nortons ram testing utility. I have to limit the ram down to 270 before Norton tests OK. I have tried it with Cacheman both on and off with the same results.
Should I just disregard whatever Norton says??
Cacheman shows 282 free after I have booted up with all 384 on.
I've read posts where guys are not happy with Norton. I know it is pretty well imposible to get rid of Norton once it is loaded. It seems to me that Norton doesn't really do much more than what windows own utilities will do.
Any opinions on your faith in Norton Utilities and is there any good ram diagnostic utility out there?
I'd really like to know for sure that all my ram is available.

I have argued this point before and maybe it's just habit. I have Norton Utilities swince the DOS days when there was a Peter Norton involved with Norton Utilities.

I feel that the Norton Disk Doctor is much better than scandisk and I also feel that Speeddisk is faster then defrag. I have had mixed results with Windoctor.

It may be habit, but I am generally happy with Norton Utiliites. If you are having a problem, look on their web site or send them an e-mail there may be a simple fix involved.

There are some things that Norton does well and there are others.....

Speeddisk/Disk Doctor are two of the ones Norton does very well. The memory check and some of the other related utilities, in a word, stink.

There are also problems if the whole suite is installed(problems tend to be compounded over if just the indiviual items are installed), plus they tend to be very version specific.

I have not trusted Norton since I installed one of the early version of Norton Utilities for Windoze and ended up having to reformat and reinstall to fix my system. I use all utility suites very selectively now, installing only the things that I think I might actually need and that won't mess up my system. I generally avoid system indexers, things that offer crash protection (except against themselves) and things that are likely to be memory hogs. I use SystemSuite right now, but I don't have any of it running automatically and didn't install about half of it.

I have used Norton utilities for along time, since win3.1 and for the most things it works very well. On the new version [2002] the system info is off, when I changed monitors and resolutions the info was not picked up. Also on speed disk it is not accurate as to how fragmented your drive is. It does do a good job and also defrags the page files, but as time goes on the utilities become less and less important. What is good with Norton is their Anti virus and security programs.
This is on a p4 win xp setup with 512 mb, the reason I added this is that resourses are not an issue. On some other machines it is a BIG issue.
Mark:)

I remember PC Magazine, I think it was, back in 1990 or 1991, comparing Norton Utilities and PC Tools, and recommending the latter, which I then purchased. My computer at the time was my first pc (I previously had owned a mac), my first "build", a 386 DX 25MZ clone barebones with a 5.25 floppy drive. I added a Hercules video card (with a whopping 256K memory), a monochrome monitor, and Mitsubishi 40 mg hdd that cost $200.00. All in all, a pretty hot machine in 1990. Anyway, PC Tools, and I suspect Norton, were great sets of tools back then. They had file managers, defraggers, resource monitors, stuff like that, none of which came with dos (I was still using dos 3.3, and then upgraded to 5.0). Utilities were truly that: utility programs that made dos easier to use and allowed you to better maintain your machine. I don't know about anybody else, but nowadays the only non-windows utility I use regularly is norton antivirus. Others like defrag and scandisk come with windows (Microsoft bought up a lot of these utilities like defrag and put them in windows), or else somehow have been rendered irrelevant. I see absolutely no value in Norton Utilities, especially in light of the massive headaches it has caused some people, e.g., actually slowing down machines, etc. I have used selected features from Ontrack's Fix-It Utilities, and sort of liked Powerdesk, a file manager, that came with it, but in the long run rarely used any of the tools, and in fact had some problems. In my humble opinion, the benefits of these utility packages simply do not outweigh the risk and potential problems.

I bought PCTools for Windoze when it first came out and found that it was one of the first companies to send out a beta as a finished product. It was the buggiest mess I had ever seen. I went from a loyal PCTools user to a hater of the company. I believe they alienated enough other people that they don't even exist today, but the other utility suites have continued some of the same garbage and distribute buggy software as finished product. Again, I urge caution in using any of these suites and to only install some of the stuff you know you will need.