Dinosaur Sightings: Norton Utilities 3.0 for Windows 95

Like the box, the CD cover featured a stern looking Peter Norton, who after selling his company to Symantec 7 years earlier, still took time to have his picture taken for the product packaging. Of course, Peter Norton had moved on to other philanthropic endeavors and pursued his hobby of collecting contemporary art.

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The CD format allowed the set of utilities to be accompanied by a set of training videos.

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The installation began with a brief animation that evolved into the splash screen which looked like solid metal frame with menu options for installing the program, watching an introductory video, and detailing the included trialware—Norton AntiVirus and Norton Uninstall Deluxe.

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As the Installation progressed, little splash screens highlighted all the new features.

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The first thing that you saw when the installation was complete was the Norton System Doctor, which provided a host of system real-time monitoring tools called Sensors. Notice that the Norton took over the Recycle Bin. The Norton Utilities Integrator was the main interface for the utilities.

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The sensors were designed for at a glance viewing and presented information in bar charts, gas gauges, and stop lights with green, yellow and red light indicators. If a problem was detected, not only would the stoplight turn red, but you would also receive an alarm notice.

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Clicking notice revealed more information as well as a link that launched the appropriate utility to fix the problem.

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In addition to the Norton Utilities Integrator, all the utilities were available on the Start menu.

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The Norton Utilities Integrator, which was a new feature in Version 3.0, was designed to simplify the use of the powerful utilities. As you can see, the left panel categorized the utilities and the right displayed each utility along with a link to a detailed Help file. Many of the Help files were augmented with interactive demos that allowed you to walk through the process of using key utilities.

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The Norton WinDoctor utility was designed to diagnose and repair the most common types of Windows 95 problems

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Once it was running, the WinDoctor could find and fix lost shortcuts, invalid registry entries, broken applications, missing DLLs and much more

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The Norton CrashGuard was a utility that ran in the background continuously looking for situations that could potentially cause a system crash. (The shield icon in the notification area indicated that Norton CrashGuard was running.)

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If a crash occurred, CrashGuard would intervene, recover the system, and allow you to save any unsaved data.

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Norton Anti-Freeze, a component of the Norton CrashGuard, would allow you to revive unresponsive programs.

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Still the heart of the package, the Norton Disk Doctor would diagnose and repair a variety of disk problems.

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Norton Disk Doctor performed several tests, checking everything from the disk's partition table to its physical surface.

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When it was finished, Norton Disk Doctor displayed the results on a clipboard.

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The UnErase Wizard could help you instantly find and recover deleted files that were protected by Norton Protection or the standard Windows Recycle Bin. If a file was recoverable but couldn’t be recovered automatically, UnErase Wizard could walk you through the procedure to reconstruct it.

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Norton File Compare let you easily compare different versions of a text file, see what changed between versions, and selectively undo changes.

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The Improve Performance Category included Speed Disk, Norton Optimization Wizard and the Space Wizard.

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As Speed Disk went to work defragmenting your hard disk each block would change colors depending on what was being done to it. The Legend, which displayed in a separate dialog box, helped you to keep track each step along the way.

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One of the neatest features of Speed Disk was that you could click on any block, and in the Block Detail dialog box, see all the files that were in that particular block.

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The Norton Optimization Wizard was designed to improve Windows 95’s performance by optimizing such critical elements as the swap file, the application loading process and the registry.

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Space Wizard was essentially the precursor to Microsoft's Disk Cleanup, but on steroids. The Comprehensive method identified a host of disk space wasters, such as temporary files, common discardable files, infrequently used files, large files, and duplicate files.

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The Preventative Maintenance category included the Norton System Doctor, which we saw earlier, Rescue Disk, Image, and the Norton Registry Tracker.

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Norton Rescue Disk allowed you to create a set of Rescue Disks which you could then use to revive your system in the event of a hard disk disaster. If you had an Iomega Zip drive, you could create a Rescue Disk on a single Zip disk.

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Norton Image took a snapshot of you hard disk’s critical file information, including the boot record and FAT. The image information was then used by the UnErase Wizard and UnFormat to restore deleted files or directories and rebuild deleted folders in the event you accidentally deleted files of formatted the hard disk.

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Norton Registry Tracker was designed to make it very easy to keep track of any changes that were made to the registry by programs, thus making it a lot easier to locate bungled changes.

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The Troubleshoot category included System Information, Norton Registry Editor, and the Norton Web Services. (The latter being a subscription-based service the provided access to a Web site containing a host of web-based utilities.)

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System Information was quite a comprehensive tool providing you with all kinds of very detailed information about your computer, the peripherals, and network connections.

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Norton Registry Editor was a great editing tool for the registry. In addition, it allowed you to import and export registry information, track changes, undo changes, and even bookmark frequently visited places in the registry.

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Did you use Norton Utilities 3.0 for Windows 95?

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