I have been a diehard fan of Norton Utilities for many many years... that is, up until Norton 2005, then everything changed.

Speed Disk, the Norton Disk Defragmenter and Optimizer, used to do a first rate job of it, I could truly optimize the drive; I could sort the files and folders, I could move the directory listings to the front of the drive, and when I was done, my drive was in prefect order, fully optimized, and the unused space was one solid block of uninterupted space.

Now, even after three or four consecutive alleged 'optimizations' (each taking 2 to 3 hours) my drive is still a mess. Directories/folders and files are scattered through my free space. Most of the features I though were most important are gone. When Norton Speed Disk starts, it no longer does drive map scan, so I can't see a visual representation of the drive before I start the optimizing process.

In short, it does a generally crappy job. To show you what a great job Speed Disk does, at the END of my previous Defrag, my C: Drive was 7.9% fragmented. Then I ran three consecutive Defrag/Optimizations and it is now 11.9% fragmented, and my drive partition looked more like Swiss Cheeze than an optimized drive.

I ran Norton Disk Doctor today and it found some problems, but didn't fix them. It claimed I had to reboot to initiated the repairs. When I did reboot, all Norton did was run MS Scandisk. I paid all that money for Norton Utilities, so that those utilities could run a free MS program???? That doesn't make sense.

Further, with past versions of Norton, I could run critical utilities like Disk Doctor and Speed Disk in Safe Mode, or if worst came to worst, DOS mode, but they no longer seem to run in Safe Mode and DOS is just a memory. What's a guy to do?

I am currently using Norton System Works 2006 V9 Build 103. And for the most part it is worthless, or at least the features I most depended on are now worthless.

So what's the problem? Has Norton adopted a new design philosophy? Is it a problem with Win-XP?

Can anyone recommend a set of System Utilities that can actually do the Job?

For reference-

I installed Win-XP over Win-98 but left the drives in FAT32 format. My computer is generally stable and serves my needs very nicely. Norton was installed after the Win-XP upgrade.

ABIT KT7/Athlon Thunderbird 900/512Mb DRAM
Maxtor 60Gb (partitioned 8/15.6/15.6/15.6)
Saphire ATI Radeon 7000 video
19" Viewsonic GS790 CRT Monitor

So, two basic questions-

1.)What the he|| happened to Norton?

2.) What is the best alternative to Norton for System Utilities? Especially, a top quality Defrag Program.

I'm open to suggestions.

Steve/boyblue