Norton--a Good Guy for PC Users
Peter Norton is the quintessential good guy of personal computing. Since 1982, his Norton Utilities have been rescuing hapless computer users from all manner of catastrophes.
The utilities are small computer programs. They perform specific tasks that the operating system for IBM PCs and compatible computers either can’t do easily or at all and that application programs such as word processors and spreadsheets ignore.
The utilities’ beginnings were humble. Like many of us, Norton mistakenly erased files on his IBM PC. But unlike most of us, he was a programming analyst with the skills to do something about it.
So Norton wrote the first version of the Norton Utility, which became the mainstay of the collection of utilities he would market. The Norton Utility gained fame for its “unerase” function, which restores deleted files (as well as the sanity of many computer users who have accidentally erased data).
Some of the other Norton Utility programs help you manage your computer by performing fairly routine tasks, such as finding files or displaying a list of your files sorted in a particular way. Others do more complicated chores, such as controlling the colors you see on the screen of a color monitor or even diagnosing whether there are problems with your disk drives.
One often-cited utility is System Information, which compares the speeds of various models of IBM and compatible personal computers.
In the early days of the Norton Utilities, you had to be fairly technically inclined to get the most out of them. But the latest release is the easiest to use and the most powerful. Virtually anybody who owns an IBM or compatible computer can use the newest Norton Utilities. Anyone with a hard disk should consider the utilities as must-have software because sooner or later they will be needed.
Sales of the utilities over the years have made Norton so rich that these days he gets as much attention for his art collecting as for his computer programming.
In fact, at age 45, Norton no longer writes program updates himself, saying he is “too old” to be good at it. Instead, he hires younger, “smarter” programmers and compares his role as chairman of the board and chief executive of Norton Computing to that of Toscanini directing an orchestra with the wave of a baton.
Norton’s latest baton waving has brought forth Norton Utilities, version 4.5, which comes in a standard edition for $100 and in an advanced edition for $150.
The advanced edition is worth the extra cost. It includes a program called the Norton Disk Doctor, which does an amazing job of fixing program glitches and user errors that can render a floppy or hard disk useless.
In my column two weeks ago, I described three programs that can find and repair hardware failures in hard disks. Norton’s Disk Doctor does not fix hardware problems, although the errors it finds might result from hardware failures.
Every disk must have certain information in the right place before the computer can use the disk. One such requirement is the “boot track,” which gets the computer off to the right start as it begins to use that disk. Another necessary component is the file allocation table, which is like the table of contents in a book.
The Disk Doctor knows how those two portions of a disk should read. If they are wrong, it has the ability to rebuild them into their proper form, making a disk usable again. A bug in one of your programs might cause such a problem, or even turning off your computer before you exit a program could do it.
Kraig Lane, Norton’s product manager for the utilities, gave me a very convincing demonstration of Disk Doctor’s abilities. First, he destroyed the boot track and file allocation table data (using another feature of the utilities that allows any portion of a disk to be changed). Then he ran Disk Doctor, which quickly found all the problems, reported them on the screen and then repaired them. The result was a perfectly usable disk.
Along with the Disk Doctor, the advanced edition comes with an excellent book called the Norton Trouble Shooter. Written clearly and simply, the book makes it easy for anyone, regardless of how little they know about how their computer works, to diagnose problems when it doesn’t work right.
You don’t need a disaster to find the utilities valuable, however. Safe Format is the name of a new utility in the standard and advanced editions that is a much welcome alternative to the DOS command for formatting a new disk so that it can store programs and data. Norton’s version gives you great control over the process and is especially nice on computers equipped with more than one size of floppy disk drive, 5 1/4 and 3 1/2-inch models, for instance.
The Norton Control Center is a feature you can use every day, giving you control over screen colors, cursor size and, on some computers, cursor speed.
Format Recover is an angel of mercy if you accidentally reformat your hard disk, wiping out all of your programs and files. It will restore most, if not all, of them. (Of course, if you use Safe Format you won’t commit such an error.)
Another new utility, Batch Enhancer, is aimed at experts who like to write their own computer control programs, or “batch files.” It allows those programs to be much more sophisticated.
And then there is File Date, which allows you to change the date and time assigned automatically to files whenever they are created or modified. It is probably of more use to experts than to casual users.
The old favorites among the Norton Utilities are still there, each easily accessible through the Norton Integrator, which displays a menu of choices of the utility programs.
There is File Find, which helps you locate misplaced files and print listings of your disk directories. File Info gives you a way to augment the limit of 11 characters that DOS allows for file names by attaching descriptive comments to those names.
Line Print is a fast way to print text files, complete with margins, page numbers and line numbers. Speed Disk reorganizes files on a disk so that they are stored contiguously, not in fragments. Text Search allows users to search files, even erased ones, for any word or phrase.
The Norton Utility itself has also been spruced up to make it easier to operate and easier to understand.
Finally, for the security-conscious, there is Wipe Disk, which erases the contents of a disk so thoroughly that it meets the latest Department of Defense security specifications.
Computer File welcomes readers’ comments but regrets that the author cannot respond individually to letters. Write to Richard O’Reilly, Computer File, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, Calif. 90053.
