( 6 reviews )
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Posted: Aug 1 2008
Unless you are very computer knowledegable and experienced, I would not recommend this product for you. The level of difficulty in using is very high and I am a certified computer technican with years of experience. Poor User manual. Also after installing on Vista I was immediately confronted with a Ghost Status window showing I needed to create a Recovery Point and no suggested default location for this. When attempted to create on DVD disk it would reach 17% and never finish. Took help on two different days using Norton live online chat to fix.
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Posted: Aug 1 2008
I have used an older version of Norton Ghost for years to manage computer backups and disk imaging and have been very satisfied. Since many of the reviews here were not very helpful and descriptive as to what the problems were, I decided I would download and test the trial version from the Symantec/Norton website. I first uninstalled my older version of Norton Ghost (always a good idea). I then installed Ghost 14.0 on an older laptop (Dell Inspiron 2560) running XP SP2, 30 GB HDD, 512 MB RAM. The installation went fine (the install file is ~90Mb), but was rather slow. I decided to answer all of the "default" question and chose "Easy Setup". Norton recommended a "backup strategy". So far so good. I then performed a backup of the entire computer to an external USB hard drive. I had 10 GB of data to backup but since this laptop has the older USB 1.0 ports, I knew that it would be slow. It took around 2 hours to complete a backup. Fine. I then decided to run "Live Update" just to make sure the software was up to date. The software said it was going to run this at installation. Apparently it didn't because there were new updates. You'll need a high speed internet connection to run this service as the updates can be over 20MB. The updates took forever to install - I almost killed the program because it froze and it wasn't clear that it was doing anything. OK, so far so good. Now for remote administration. I have several computers that I want to manage remotely. I installed Norton 14.0 on another machine and attempted to connect to the other installation. I could not connect remotely to my "test" computer and the online help pages did not give any troubleshooting tips. I turned windows firewall off and searched in vain for answers on the internet. (I even went into the Norton service and set the "log on" to a new user (administrator) account that I created). Since this didn't work, I tried it the other way, trying to connect from my initial installation to my new installation. No go. So after messing around with this for several hours, I am going to give up and try another product. I am disappointed that this didn't work. I didn't even try to restore the backup that I created since that was a moot point (although even that was problematic and confusing and the help didn't really "help"). One last thing that I would say is that I agree with other reviews that the documentation is confusion, lacking and not really geared for the "plug and play" user.
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( 1 of 2 found this review helpful ) Posted: Jul 25 2008
Since I have been using Norton products for years, it was a natural for me to select Ghost as my personal backup facility. It is easy to use and wonderfully powerful and complete. I cannot think of another product that I have used in the past that has the ease of use and the features available for the right price.
