DOS Days

Let's Explore: Norton Utilities v7.00

Introduction

The name Norton Utilities is synonymous with DOS computing in the 80s and 90s. It was a collection of tools that expanded on what the operating system provided, and became an essential product for many.

Norton Utilities version 7.00 arrived in March 1993 and was the last version that was 100% for DOS, this time designed to work with MS-DOS 6.0. Subsequent versions continued to provide the DOS utilities but added ones for Windows 3.x also.

Over version 6, it's biggest new features were support for compressed drives (e.g. Stacker, DoubleSpace, and SuperStor), support for hard disks up to 2 GB in size, and added new utilities like Norton Diagnostics to test your computer's hardware. It also came with enhancements to the Disk Editor, File Fix, Emergency Recovery Disk, and File Find, as well as an improved NDOS (we'll get more into that later).

If a full installation was selected, it would take up 4.6 MB of disk space. Whilst it was typical to install Norton Utilities to a hard disk, you could run most utilities directly from the floppy disks, but there was one dependent file that many of the larger utilities used that needed to be included.

The utilities can be broadly grouped into four categories:

  • Recovery - Norton Diagnostics, Disk Doctor, Disk Editor, Disk Tools, File Fix, Image, Rescue Disk, SmartCan, UnErase, and UnFormat.
  • Security - Disk Monitor, Diskreet, and WipeInfo.
  • Speed - Calibrate, Norton Cache, and Speed Disk.
  • Tools - Batch Enhancer, Configuration, Control Center, Directory Sort, Duplicate Disk, File Attributes, File Date, File Find, File Locate, File Size, Line Print, Norton CD, Safe Format, System Info, and Text Search.

Norton Utilities 7.00 came with a text-based menu system to more easily run these utilities - just run NORTON.EXE.


The Norton Utilities menu, accessible by simply running NORTON.EXE

 

Norton Utilities 7.00's main competition was still Central Point PC Tools, which offered a similar suite.

In Part 2, we'll dive into the installation of the product !