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[ Go to April 1997 Table of Contents ]
NT Enterprise
-- by Joseph C. Panettieri
Symantec is seeking to torpedo rival Executive Software with a new disk defragmenter for Windows NT that competes with Executive's popular Diskeeper. Symantec's Norton Speed Disk, expected to be available by the time you read this, can defragment NT's NTFS and FAT file systems in the background while you work with other NT applications in the foreground. As of this writing, a beta copy of Norton Speed Disk was available at http://www.symantec.com/nu/dlspeednt.html. It requires at least NT 4.0 running on an Intel-compatible processor, 16MB of RAM and 8.5MB of disk space. Norton Speed Disk represents Symantec's latest attempt to corner the Windows NT utility market. The company already offers Norton AntiVirus 2.0 for Windows NT, pcAnywhere32, Norton NT Tools and the Norton Administrator Suite for NT. With Norton Speed Disk, Symantec is also seeking to steal the spotlight from Executive's Diskeeper 2.0, an established NT disk defragmenter that costs $125 per workstation and $399 per server (NT clients can access the Diskeeper server version at no additional charge). Executive Software also offers a free, entry-level NT defragmenter called Diskeeper Lite (http://www.execsoft.com/dklite/) So who will win the NT disk defrag war? Symantec enjoys several major advantages, including a workforce that's 20 times larger than Executive Software's. On the other hand, the latter is highly regarded by many NT user groups and focuses almost exclusively on NT disk defrag.
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