Gentlemen: Those that use Norton SystemWorks 2002 on XP? You

[Bursar 0]

I've had absolutely no problems with any version of SystemWorks on any platform.

 

2002 is running sweet as a nut on my XP system. It can take a while to figure out where some of the settings are as it's quite different to 2001. I haven't bothered reading the manual, but I'm sure it would help if I did

[rgodart 0]

Same here, works great on my xp. I don't know what they mean with the autoprotect issues, i never had any troubles with it.

[Marktait 0]

I had no problems but it is just a crap program on NT/2000/XP doesnt do much compared to what it does on 98/ME.

 

---------------------------------------

1.2AMD Athlon Thunderbird

Gigabyte 71XE4 M/Board

512MB PC133 Hyundai RAM

NVIDIA 64MB GeForce 2MX200 AGP

Seagate 40GB 5400Rpm ATA/100 HDD

Lite-On 16/10/40 BurnProof ReWriter

40x Compaq CDRom Drive

36x Creative CDRom Drive

Hauppage PrimioFM WinTV/Radio Card

Creative SoundBlaster 128PCI

NetGear 10/100Mbps Fast Ethernet Adapter - cable connection

Blackwidow 648 USB Scanner

Epson 580 USB Printer

 

WindowsXP Professional Corporate Platinum Edition

WindowsXP Plus Pack!

OfficeXP Professional with FrontPage

Publisher XP

----------------------------------------

[Thunder 0]

Hi APK, long time no see.

Don't suppose Norton Or M$ has put out a patch to allow Norton AV 2001 to work on XP? Saved my butt many times and hate to give it up. Same with speedisk.

[XTaticXV 0]

I only have one problem with System Works. At work I have WinXP P3 866mhz with 128mb RAM. After I installed System Works it slowed down my computer by about 50%. Unless you have at least 256mb RAM I don't recommend it. I just left the Antivirus and it works great.

[Brian Frank 0]

There's enough apps in systemworks to make it unattractive to me. WinDoctor and CrashGuard are ment to be good, but have only fu><0r3d my PC's countless times. I will never buy System Works nor any program like it. It "fixes" things, in the bad way.

[Four and Twenty 0]

i use nav corp 7.6 thats it

system works is trash if you ask me. Speed disk is cool but thats about it. can you install speeddisk only? that would be cool i will have to try that. I really do like speed disk but all the other tools are either usless or they have a goofy interface(nav 2002) or they slow the system down (nav 2002)

[Thunder 0]

Got NAV 2001 to work by installing the patch below and it has alreardy saveed me from this virus: W32.Badtrans.B@mm

 

Good luck guys.

 

Windows NT/2000/XP

1. Download the Sevinst.exe file from the following FTP site:

 

ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/symevnt/sevinst.exe

 

Save the file to a folder on the hard drive, for example, C:\Windows\Temp.

2. Type <path>sevinst.exe /navnt where <path> is the folder where you downloaded the file. For example:

 

C:\Windows\Temp\Sevinst.exe /navnt

 

3. Click OK.

4. Restart the computer.

[AznBoi79 0]

I would never load norton software on my box, from my experiecne it crashes and slows system down more then it helps it.

[gekko56 0]

Yep, just another piece of crap people seem to like installing on thier pc's.

There ARE better virus scanners out there.

Crap,Crap and more crap

 

I haven't had a single virus in 5 years because I DON'T accept e-mail and are very careful about what I download.

 

Most of my customers come to me after Nortons has trashed thier systems.

 

If you are happy with your PC leave the sucker alone..

 

Just my thoughts.....not trying to start a flaming war

[*Iblis* 0]

on a semi-related note i can't seem to get speeddisk to install, it comes up with the % counter which goesup to 100% then it disappears and that's it. any ideas?

[lammypie 0]

yeah NORTON is not what it used to be (before Symantec bought it)

 

With WinXP there is little reason to waste your money on it.

The AntiVirus is Vgood but thats it.

DiskDoctor is just a shell for the builtin CHKDSK.

SpeedDisk is OK but not really better than the winXP defragger, and has more than a few issues.

The others are really bad.

 

Get Antivirus, thats all Nortons Good for now!

[Speed4Ever 0]

AlecStaar,

 

The only issue I would have with Speedisk and XP, is that SD apparantly doesnt adhere to the layout.ini files (which XP optimizes to make apps open faster). Also, XP tends to move the MFT and MFT freespace around when it wishes, according to its optimization algorithms.

 

SD, on the other hand, throws this to the wind, and does things its own way. The end result is, they both negate eachother, and you end up with more disk activity in the long run, as XP reorganizes everything constantly, and SD takes that apart and lays everything its own way.

 

In W2K, SD rules. But in XP, all they did was update SD to work in XP, and thats it. They even said this when NU was released: they didnt modify the functionality in SD one iota, other than making sure it just ran in XP. W2K doesnt have filesystem optimization algorithms to mess with, XP does.

 

Perfectdisk and Diskeeper scan the layout.ini file, and ignore the files XP has optimized. SD doesnt AFAIK do this, as it doesnt follow the MS APIs.

 

Unless theres a way to shut off XPs FS optimizing features, XP and SD dont look to get along to good.

 

As for the rest of the NSW package, other than NAV 2002, the rest is useless or garbage. Windoctor is untrustworthy at best, disasterous at worst. The systemdoctor feature is worthless and slows you down. Practically everything in the systeminfo tool can be found elsewhere in XP if you look around. Diskdoctor, as mentioned above, adds absolutely nothing to XPs chkdsk function. Wipeinfo can be replaced by a number of freeware programs out there, not many, but a few that should work just as well. Unerase wizard may be ok for some people, but I've never had the occasion to use it, so its worthless to me (but thats my opinion, I'm sure it works fine, just kinda useless to me). Cleansweep is so-so. It sometimes locks up, and it still wont cancel out when you wish it to. This bug has been there for ages, and Symantec still hasnt fixed it yet. I wont say its bad, but sure aint good either. A number of free programs are also out there for cleaning out files and registry garbage, some doing a better job than cleansweep.

 

All in all, NAV seems to be the only redeeming feature in NSW (unless you get the pro version, which has Norton Ghost, which is a great program). Theres too many features that are for all intents and purposes, can be achieved by XP or freeware progams.

 

Now, on the other hand, if you wanted NAV and Ghost, getting the pro version *MIGHT* be worth your money, but thats questionable. If you dont need ghost, I would just go to the stand-alone NAV2002, and run, not walk, from Norton Utilities. Although it does seem to work well on some systems, its been known not to help much, or break, on many other systems.

 

Just MHO.

 

Take care.

[Speed4Ever 0]

BTW, Thought I'd just say Hi to everyone here (like I should have in my first post )

 

I've followed this Forum since I was in the W2K Preview Program, and there some excellent info I've found here. I just never got around to registering in the forums. I guess thats my loss )

 

Anyhoo, nice to finally participate in the groups.

 

AlecStaar--I hope you dont take my previous post personally. I was just stating my opinion, as we all have one

 

Take care.

[Speed4Ever 0]

AlecStaar,

 

Thanks for the reply.

 

Now heres a counterpoint to your counterpoint ...plus another question...

 

In my layout.ini file, theres approximately 4200 files in there... 8) ...Is it reasonable to enter all those files for SD to ignore? And, (I'm not sure about this, so I'd thought I'd ask...) is the online XP defrag optimization shut off using your procedure? If not, the layout enties could change often, requiring you to dig around for the new ones,etc...

 

And another few questions ...

 

Which do you think is more "optimized"? SD or XPs optimizations?

 

And is it indeed worth the time spent on trying to work around something that Symantec should have programmed into SD in teh first place? (Believe me, I've sent more than a few emails to Symantec about this. I got the standard canned speech taht didnt even answer my questions ;( ...)

 

The primary reason I'm even concerned about this is SD used to be a kick-a$$ defragger in W2K. Now its turned into a pain-in-the-a$$ in XP.

 

Would it be *THAT* difficult for them to enable SD to simply ignore the files in layout.ini? Because it just doesnt seem feasible to have to enter several THOUSAND files into SD for it to do what it should be doing automatically...

 

Personally, I think Symantec dropped the ball on this one, although many people probably dont even know about the XP optimization routine, so it doesnt even cross their minds.

 

I'd love to get SD working correctly, as I bought the NSW package awhile ago, and cant return it (although I use NAV )

 

I just wish I knew then what I know now...

 

Thanks for the replies, awaiting the next

[Speed4Ever 0]

BTW...

 

I may have answered one of my own questions...

 

In the registry, theres

 

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg, which has enable Y/N, and then theres a subkey BootOptimizeFunction whcuh has the enable Y/N also.

 

Are one of these for online defrag optimization, and the other for boot fragging, or is the whole key for boot fragging?

 

Check it out, and reply your opinion, if you so please

 

I'm really curious about this one...

 

Thanks.

[Speed4Ever 0]

Well, Option 1 seems like a viable idea. Just renamed Layout.ini to Layout.bak, and created a read-only empty Layout.ini. Its only been a few hours, so It'l probably take a few days to figure out if the read-only holds. I'll post back with results in a few days.

 

Option #2...well, I'd like to have some of what your smoking ...Imputing all those entries is far more time consuming than the time wasted running on a fully fragmented drive . If you got the time to burn, I guess you could do it, but also need to take into account that Layout.ini is changed periodically if needed. Trying to find the new entries is just not feasible.

 

I agree that Symantec could add this feature, but considering their past history, I doubt if they will (unless its added in NU 2003 ). I cant remember them EVER doing anything other than fixing bugs, or adding NAV virus updates, and such. I'm not holding my breath on that one. Not that this shouldn't be considered GLARING bug, but I just dont have the faith that I used to for Symantec.

 

I'd love to eat crow if they did though

[Speed4Ever 0]

Quote:

Because my initial method shown of turning off BootDefrag is when this all takes place, NOT during OS Operation in the GUI user shell... so Speedisk does its job just fine while it works. XP might shuffle that stuff ONLY at boottime & if they both move those files to the start of the drive, as I suspect they do for bootup speed?

I'm not sure if I'm reading this right. Are you saying that XP only moves files during boot time? If so, unless I'm mistaken, your mistaken

XP AFAIK doesnt move files during boot time. I cant exactly remember the explanation told to me word for word, but XP moves boot and app exe files during idle time when the computer is online, not during boot time. It essentially records what files are used at boot, and applications when they are opened. Then they are positioned wherever XP thinks it can find them the easiest.

I might be wrong on some of this, or it could be explained alot better, but I think thats the jist of it.

Now was this what you were talking about, or am I off here?

EDIT: Wheres GHayes when you need him

[Speed4Ever 0]

Ok, heres what I got. Its kinda long, but I'll try to keep it as short as possible...

 

This page explains Boot file optimization...

 

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/techinfo/planning/performance/startup.asp

 

"Improvements to the Boot Loader

Improvements to the boot loader and to a number of key drivers have made them much faster. Registry initialization is also faster, and many manufacturers have dramatically reduced the time taken by their BIOS prior to running the operating system.

 

I/O Can Be Overlapped with Device Initialization

Using Windows® 2000, each disk input/output (I/O) may require the disk head to move to some new location and the disk to rotate to some degree. The result is that typical desktop disks can only complete 80 I/Os to100 I/Os each second. Laptop disks are often even slower. This poor I/O rate lengthens the boot time considerably for Windows 2000.

 

Windows XP improves this poorly organized I/O process by “prefetching” much of the operating system at the same time that devices are being initialized. In this way, the I/O can be overlapped with the device initialization process. The effect is that code being executed, and data that must be read during the boot, can be scattered about the disk with no perceptible effect on startup time performance.

 

Dynamic Determination of Code and Data Needed During Boot

By observing successive boots of the system, Windows XP can dynamically determine the code and data needed for the boot and can optimize the placement of these files on the disk. When the computer boots, Windows XP can issue large I/O requests that can be handled efficiently with high throughput. Moreover, the operating system can find opportunities to issue these requests so that they will overlap in time with device detection and initialization. This is done in a way that will not add to the overall boot time. This allows for subsequent processing to occur with the operating system substantially resident in memory, and dramatically decreases the time needed for the system to boot."

--------------------------

 

This page explains application optimization...

 

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/techinfo/planning/performance/runtimeperf.asp

 

"The Process

Application startup requires the operating system to find sufficient memory resources for the new program and program code, and for data to be read in from the disk. Windows XP watches each launch of the application so that it will know how much memory will be required and what will be needed from the disk. The mechanism is the same as that used to achieve fast boot and logon. The speed with which an application is launched will usually depend on the amount of I/O necessary and the efficiency with which the I/O is handled.

 

Predicting the I/O Required

In ordinary demand paging, small amounts of text or data are fetched from all over the disk. Poorly organized I/O causes a lot of time to be lost due to disk seeks and rotations. By watching each launch, Windows XP is able to accurately predict the I/O that will be needed and issue hundreds of requests at a time. These requests are sorted, allowing them to be processed without extra seeks and rotations. With the required code and data already in memory, the application can start without having to wait for the next missing piece to arrive from the disk.

 

File access patterns in the application launch are used to periodically optimize the layout of files on the disk; improved layout decreases seek time and provides for even faster launch and faster continuing use."

-------------------------

Doesnt this clearly (maybe not clearly ) show two different functions at work?

 

Quote:

The registry entries above show it booting up & moving files in its very name. Why else is it called BootDefrag then?

 

I dont know anything about something called BootDefrag per se...

 

Heres my Registry keys...

 

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg

 

Then it has the subkey

 

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction]

 

Both keys have separate "enable" REG_SZ keys. Wouldn't this also explain two separate functions?

 

Whats your take on this?

[Speed4Ever 0]

Quote:

* On GHayes, PLEASE, DO Bring him in here too!

I tried, but he has PM and Email disabled, so I cant

It looks like he hasnt posted in awhile, so he may have (temporarily I hope) abandoned the board, or he's just too busy. I might try and dig him up in the MS XP Newsgroups. He usually pops up there...

[Speed4Ever 0]

Ok...I found some info from Greg Hayes from Raxco in the MS Newsgroups. This might help a bit...

 

"PerfectDisk will NOT disable the automatic defragmentation that Windows XP

is doing every 3 days - Microsoft "frowns" upon that in regards to 3rd party

defraggers...

 

You can disable this via a registry key -

HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/OptimalLayout. Look for a

DWORD key called EnableAutoLayout (may not be present - if not you will

need to add). If the value of this key is set to 0, then the "partial"

defrag will not run.

 

Please note that if you disable the partial defrag that Windows XP is doing

every three days, application launches could eventually get slower and you

may notice a slowdown in system performance (compared to systems where the

layout is being performed).

 

- Greg/Raxco Software"

 

P.S.- I'm assuming Greg doesnt mind me reproducing this post, as it is public info, and I assume he would want this info to be known to those who want it. Unfortunately, I cant contact him.

 

This at least explains how to shut the damned thing down, but I'm not so sure its a bright idea to

[Speed4Ever 0]

Quote:

Answer my last question first in my last post please,

(I understand you think that my fix of adding files to Speedisk's exemption list would NOT stop it from interfering with XP optimization)

Because that is exactly what I use here, & you know that from above, I add files to its "DO NOT TOUCH THESE FILES" in Speedisk's list for that!

I never said you couldn't.

I said the average person would have to be smoking some good stuff to go through all that, when the program should be doing it anyways.

I mean, we're talking thousands of files here. And to add to the frustration, the files in layout.ini are dynamically changing from time to time (as you add or delete programs, files, etc.) I dont even know if I would do it one time, much less several times over the course of a few weeks. ;(

Thats not optimization, thats smoking some good stuff

To me, theres only three feasible options here.

1) Do it your way and edit SD according to layout.ini.

2) Disable XPs optimization routines and let SD run the show.

3) Find a defragger that already ignores the layout.ini files.

To me, I could do ok with #3, I could maybe live with #2, but for #1, uh uh, not for me. And you'd have a tough time convincing anyone else of that.

Your method works. I never denied that.

But wheres the logic in it? A defrag program should be designed to *SAVE* you time, not waste it. And when you have to spend time making up for a function that the software should ALREADY HAVE, thats wasting time, when its performed by practically every other defragger out there.

Alex, you pride yourself on being a tweaker, and making your computer run smoothly. Why do you do this? I would have to assume because you want your computer to run as fast as it can, as smooth as it can, and as reliable as it can. Why? So you can perform fast, and save time.

At least I think thats why. Please tell me if I'm mistaken.

#1 is not tweaking. Its wasting time IMHO.

'Nuff said about that...

As for the lack of "specific technical" information, right at the moment, thats the best I could find. The info may somewhere deep in technet or something, but I havent found it yet. And not for the lack of trying I might even be in the XP Resource Kit, but I dont have one yet, and may not for several weeks. For right now, the best I can do is what I gave you, plus the Greg Hayes posts in the NG's. His info is probably more helpful than MS's

But I do believe that the information in tose pages I gave you answered pretty much all the questions we had before (with the exception of "Specific Mechanics"). If your looking for source code, we might be waiting for awhile....

Your turn...

[Speed4Ever 0]

Also, for a more in depth information, you might go here...

 

http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/fastboot/download/fastboot-winxp.ZIP

 

Thats the white papers on fastboot. This document might have the most specific information we're going to find at MS

 

Tell me what you think of it.

[Speed4Ever 0]

I'll try and write a response to your previous post tomorrow evening, gotta go to work tomorrow

 

Your patch sounds like a great idea. Go for it, man!

 

Try SDOoptions.dll in the speed disk folder. I havent got anything that will read a DLL properly (any hints where I can find one? ), but reading that one, what I could make of it, showed hints of a lot of what looked like registry entries. I'll give it a go when I get back home in the evening.

 

Have a good one on me

[Speed4Ever 0]

Dude, scratch that last post.

 

Try here...

 

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Symantec\Speed Disk\Local Settings\Drive Option Sets\_Default\C:\psaUnmovableFiles]

@="2"

"0"="system32.dll"

 

I set system32.dll as a random file (why? I dunno ), just to make sure I could find the right place. That was what I found. So check it out...

 

It looks like it sets each excluded file as a separate REG_SZ key, starting from 0 and working its way up. I'm almost certain yours is filled to the hilt 8)

 

Does that help any?

 

Let me know, I'll talk to you tomorrow...