Tune up applications frightens me. They often don’t do much good and they sometimes break things. Especially the “one button click” options are either useless or scary. One example of a tune application that resulted in a disaster in my case was Fix It! Utilities Professional 12.

I try to keep after my computers myself to some degree. Every now and then I defragment the hard drives, I disable automatic startup of services that I don’t need, I uninstall applications I don’t need, clean out temporary files, keep my hard disk clean, clean my so called web browser cache, and use good anti-malware software, etc. These kinds of tasks do not have to be done often so doing it manually is no big deal. However, there are some things that are harder to do manually such as making sure the system registry is in good shape. Therefore it may still be worth using good tune up software. So when the Amazon vine program offered me Norton Utilities 16.0 for free I decided to try it out. Overall my impression of Norton Utilities 16.0 is that it is OK.


Overview of Norton Utilities 16.0

Norton Utilities 16.0 for one user and three PC’s is compatible with Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista (32-bit & 64-bit), and Windows 7 and Windows 8. It includes a lot of functionality. It does disk defragmentation, system registry cleaning and defragmentation, cleans browser cache, cookies, does privacy cleaning, windows optimization, startup optimization, clears document history, etc. It also scans for unused applications, and you bleach disks, and shred files, and you can do a registry backup, find duplicate files, uninstall unused software, and recover lost files.

Bleach disks means that you scramble the bytes/bits of unused disk space. That way deleted files are truly gone. This is especially useful if you’ve got something to hide. Recovering lost files is sort of the opposite. You can get back files that you’ve accidentally deleted. However, in my experience this feature does not work very well. Sooner rather than later the deleted files will become near impossible to recover. Finding duplicate files could be useful to some people. However, I have tons of intentionally duplicate files that I do not want removed, so no thank you. I think registry backup is important. If something goes wrong during registry cleaning you want to be able to go back. Well it is pretty easy to backup the system registry yourself if you know how to open the system registry editor, but I think that most people don’t know how to do that, so it is a useful function.


Norton Utilities 16.0 Installation & Support

Norton Utilities 16.0 for one user and three PC’s include 24/7 support that includes FAQ, forums, and email support. If this does not help you also have 24/7 chat support as well as phone support, which is pretty nice.

I installed Norton Utilities 16.0 on one of my Windows 7 systems. The installation was pretty straight forward. You just follow the simple instructions of an installation Wizard. Unfortunately it required a restart, but that is OK. After installing you can activate Norton Utilities 16.0 using a 32 character key. You have 30 days to do that in case you just want to try out the product for 30 days before deciding whether to keep it or not.


Norton Utilities 16.0 User Interface

The user interface is pretty nice for a tune application. It is colorful and features five tabs; Dashboard, Performance, Privacy, Recovery, and Settings. The Dashboard features current information, performance information, an activation button, and a 1-click optimization button. The 1-click optimization is what you would use if you don’t know anything up about Norton Utilities 16.0 and tune up. The 1-click optimization includes registry cleaning, privacy cleaning, windows optimization, disk defragmentation, and unused application scan by default. You can change this under the settings tab. These are in general pretty safe operations and I don’t want anything else added to this list. By default a daily tune up including registry cleaning, privacy cleaning, and boot disk defragmentation is done. These are pretty safe operations. However, it is annoying to have this done daily, especially when privacy cleaning includes removing browser history and cookies. I’d rather keep some of my cookies and some of my browser history, thank you. Luckily you can disable automatic tune up. I run tune up when I want to, thank you very much!

Under the Performance tab you find things like clean/compact registry, defragment disks, optimize windows, and boost windows startup. Under the Privacy you find clear windows history (including document history), clear browsing history, software traces, bleach disks, and shred files. The latter two are never automatic. Under Recovery you find recover lost files, find duplicate files, repair drives, restore registry backups, and uninstall unused software. Naturally all those actions are initiated individually.


My Experience with Norton Utilizes 16.0

The scheduled optimization and (later the 1-click optimization) did not do any good as far as I could tell. The startup time for my PC increased significantly and I had a hiccup during startup after the first optimization. Well according to Norton this might happen because of garbage cleaning upon startup. In any case, the computer did not run faster as far as I could tell and browsing was definitely not faster. Well I should say that I did not benchmark my computer before and after so I don’t really know if there was a small non-noticeable performance improvement for windows.

However, I did notice that my history and cookies were gone, which was sort of annoying. Sometimes you need to clear out your history and you need to keep out unnecessary cookies, but I had that under control. I did not want my stored passwords and all my browser history to vanish. I should say that you can configure Norton Utilities 16.0 not to do that. However, you are prompted to start an initial scan without getting any information about this. It would also have been nice to have been prompted about saving the system registry before the initial scan just in case something would go wrong. Well luckily nothing did go wrong (as far as I know). So in that sense Norton Utilities 16.0 is annoying.

However, after running deep defragmentation and deep registry clean (separate options) and optimizing startup services the windows startup time improved by about 30%, which is good. I was surprised how fast disk defragmentation was. I should say that you need to be careful with deep defragmentation. You need to exclude the restore section of the disk from deep defragmentation or you’ll lose your restore points and that’s bad. Luckily you get a warning about it.


Comparing Norton Utilizes 16.0, PC Health Advisor and Fix It Utilities 12

Other tune up utilities I’ve used are PC Health Advisor from ParetoLogic and Fix It! Utilities Professional 12 from Avanquest. Fix It! Utilities Professional 12 from Avanquest comes with many tools similar to those of Norton Utilities 16.0 such as registry cleaning, removing of temporary files, disk defragmentation, etc, and like Norton Utilities 16.0 it has file restore and file shredder. In addition Fix It! Utilities Professional 12 also comes with anti-malware features and it is valid for five PC’s. In that sense it is superior to Norton Utilities 16.0. However, Fix It! Utilities Professional 12 removed files that I needed and it ultimately broke one of my PC’s. So compared to Fix It! Utilities Professional 12 Norton Utilities 16.0 is the winner.

PC Health Advisor 3.1 from ParetoLogic also have many of the same features as the other tune applications including registry cleaning, removing of temporary files, disk defragmentation, startup optimization, and it check for driver updates and does the updates. In addition it keeps track of system restore points, and you can create system restore points using PC Health Advisor. It also detects malware processes and includes special tools for searching the disk, which I believe is an advantage it has over Norton Utilities 16.0. Just as for the other two applications the improvements I saw with PC Health Advisor were minimal and just as with Fix It! Utilities Professional 12 it broke stuff. Every time I used PC Health Advisors “Fix All” feature the EasyGuard application needed to be reinstalled. In addition the customer service refused to take responsibility for this and blamed it on non-existent malware. Therefore Norton Utilities 16.0 comes out on top again but the margin is narrower this time.


Final Recommendation Norton Utilizes 16.0

Norton Utilities 16.0 did not do much good but it appears that it did some good and unlike some other tune up utilities I’ve tried it did not cause havoc and disaster. So it does seem to be somewhat useful. However, it is also somewhat annoying as I explained above.  It has some potentially useful features such as registry backup, recover lost files, and disk bleach. Therefore I can recommend Norton Utilities 16.0 even though I am not too enthusiastic about it. I leave it a ho-hum recommendation with a three star rating

Recommended: Yes