What is Norton Utilities 3.5.x?

Norton Utilises v3.5 was announced on 1997-05-12.

It includes Norton Crashguard, Speed Disk, Norton Disk Doctor, Disk Editor, FileSaver, UnErase, Volume Recover, Wipe Info, System Info, DiskLight, FastFind.

Norton CrashGuard replaced Norton Fastback and Floppier.

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If Dante penned The Inferno today, he’d include an inner circle of hell populated by shrieking computer users doomed to suffer massive hard drive failures seconds before critical deadlines. To avoid joining this Disk Drive of the Damned Club, pick up a copy of Norton Utilities 3.5 and your eternal salvation is assured. Much as we hate to admit it, Macs crash, and when they do, bad things can happen to good computers. Backing up regularly is your best defense against losing data, but Norton Utilities often can save the day even in the absence of a recent backup.

Current users of Norton Utilities will notice little change in the package’s core set of components: Disk Editor (provides powerful tools for low-level repair and recovery), DiskLight (indicates disk access with a blinking icon). Fast Find (improves on Apple’s Find command), FileSaver (maintains disk information for use by other components), Norton Disk Doctor (diagnoses and repairs common disk problems). System Info (tests performance and analyzes system configuration), UnErase (recovers deleted flies). Volume Recover (salvages crashed disks), and Wipe Info (truly erases volumes). However, that’s not to say that nothing has changed.

Version 3.5 is compatible with System 7.1 through Mac OS 8, and it comes on a bootable CD-ROM. Furthermore, Speed Disk has been improved, and Norton Fastback, Norton Expand, and Floppier have been eliminated to make room for a new component, CrashGuard.

The bootable CD eliminates the need to create and use Emergency Disk floppies when your drive takes a dive. If the dreaded blinking question mark appears at startup, rescue flies from the digital files by simply popping in the Norton Utilities CD and running the appropriate component to piece together the fragments of your System and get back to work. If you need to rescue a Mac that lacks a CD-ROM drive, Symantec thoughtfully included Apple’s Disk Copy 4.2 and images of startup disks containing individual utilities.

Speed Disk, which increases hard disk performance by rewriting all files in contiguous blocks, is the only old component to get a major overhaul in version 3.5. Symantec claims defragmentation is up to twice as fast as before. Although we couldn’t confirm this, we certainly noticed a significant performance increase.

Speed Disk now offers seven optimization profiles to match your work patterns: CD-ROM Mastering moves files to the front of the disk; Disk Resizing does the same but is faster because it defrags less rigorously; General Use groups similar file types together; Multimedia coalesces files to maximize the size of free space; Recently Used Files condenses files on your disk by date accessed; Software Development groups source files and project files used by programmers; and Speed Disk 3.2 uses the old defragmentation profile. To top it all off. Speed Disk now is scriptable using AppleScript.

CrashGuard is an intriguing utility that runs on Power Macs only. When a program crashes, CrashGuard attempts to give you the chance to save open documents before the whole System comes down. In everyday use, CrashGuard is a mixed As advertised, it certainly constrains program crashes to a greater degree than does the Mac OS alone, and its attempt to fix a program’s ailment works roughly three out of five times. CrashGuard can’t prevent crashes, but if it rescues you from losing work even once under a deadline, it will pay for the entire cost of Norton Utilities.

Despite the improvements, the heart of Norton Utilities remains Norton Disk Doctor. It successfully tackled a wide range of problems on three very different test systems, although it typically took two passes to straighten out all errors. Recovering hard disks is a luck-of-the-draw operation under even the best circumstances, so the use of Norton Disk Doctor is no substitute for regular backups.

Norton Utilities 3.5 is an indispensable program that should be on every Mac, Hopefully, Symantec will give the Mac parity with the Windows version by adding the LiveUpdate feature, which automatically downloads and installs updates using the Internet. There’s enough value here anyway to more than earn Norton Utilities’ keep. With few exceptions, disk drives are more reliable than ever, but the flip side is that when trouble arrives, it hits suddenly, with little warning, and, of course, at the worst moment. As Dante realized, there’s nothing like contemplating a few inner circles of hell to prod you back to the straight and narrow.

Santalesa, Rich. (December 1997). Norton Utilities 3.5. MacAddict. (pg. 64).

Download Norton Utilities 3.5.x for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.1 up to Mac OS 8.6

Compatibility notes

 Architecture: 68K (68020 or newer)

Mac OS 7.1 - Mac OS 8.6

• Version 3.5.1 released in July 1997, support Mac OS 8
• Version 3.5.2 released in November 1997, improves support of HFS+ file system.
• Version 3.5.3 released in January 1998, identical to 3.5.2, only the version of the OS on the CD; this is the latest version which support

(from wikipedia.com)

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver