Norton Utilities for Macs fills gaps in System 8.1 and HFS+

I love software upgrades. Unfortunately, since the introduction of Mac System 8.1, there has been one problem - 8.1 offered a much more efficient disk format, so you can store more files on your hard disk.

The only catch was that if you upgraded to HFS+, there was not much choice in disk-repair utilities and nothing in the way of disk-defragmenting and optimising software.

Enter Symantec to the rescue. Norton Utilities 4.0 for the Macintosh is finally here. The software not only upgrades both features and performance, but also is fully compatible with HFS+ disks.

The installation CD, which doubles as a bootable emergency disk, installs the core Norton software as well as several system-level extensions. One, the Norton shared-library, is required to run Disk Doctor and Speed Disk - important because it means you no longer can boot Norton from the system disk that came with your machine. You must use the Norton CD.

Other installed extensions and control panels include File Saver, which records information automatically about files so they can be retrieved if accidentally deleted.

File Saver can scan your disk for problems when the machine is idle, or scan disks for problems when your computer starts - invaluable should a computer crash, especially if the machine is in an office where people might not be diligent about checking disks after a crash.

Disk Doctor windows have a new System 8.X look and feel. Tasks such as scanning for bad blocks and checking individual files are now done simultaneously rather than one after another. It makes it a bit easier if you want to manually skip some of the tests, but beyond that I did not see any performance gain. Looks neat, though.