What's New in Norton Power Eraser 6.0?

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The most obvious change to Norton Power Eraser 6.0 will be the wholesale UI update to better align with NS. We also removed extra dialogs and steps. We tried to keep aligned with the overall vision of NPE during this rewrite while building the foundation for improvements in the future.

Visibility Improvements

An original goal of NPE 5.3 was to be simple and effective. With that in mind, there were choices to hide details. With NPE 6.0 we want to keep the UI clean yet expose the details in a way that will help the more seasoned user to determine their action without confusing the more novice user.

Results

The results screen in NPE 6.0 gives clear path details and when the item was installed. Actionable data without the need to dig deeper in some cases.

By default, everything is selected for removal in NPE 5.3. In NPE 6.0, only the high items are selected.

NPE 5.3

NPE 6.0

Drill down

NPE 6.0 makes it very clear what will happen if you select an item for cleanup.

NPE 5.3

NPE 6.0

NPE 5.3

NPE 6.0

Clean Up

In NPE 6.0 you can drill down to see what will or did happen by clicking on the file path.

Ready:

NPE 5.3

NPE 6.0

Removed:

NPE 5.3

NPE 6.0

Undo

Undo will only work for the version you did the cleanup with.

The example below shows that on the same VM, NPE 6.0 has been run many times. NPE 5.3 only once.

Select Session:

NPE 5.3

NPE 6.0

Restore:

NPE 5.3

NPE 6.0

Restored:

NPE 5.3

NPE 6.0

Extensible

NPE 6.0 is rewritten from the ground up and leverages core functionality with NFT. This means that over time it will be easier for us to introduce detection and remediation features only found in NFT. That being said, we will do this cautiously as NFT has a different mission than NPE.

Differences

OS Support

NPE 5.3 will continue to work on newer operating systems but it will not receive any feature enhancements and is already behind in SMR support.

• NPE 5.3 will support Vista and XP.
• NPE 6.0 will support Windows 7 and newer.

Target OS in 5.3, not in 6.0

A feature that will be missing from NPE 6.0 will be to target a cleanup of a windows system that is currently not running. The old NBRT used to provide NPE when it was a boot-able Windows image. Since we were required to move to a Linux boot-able image, NPE was no longer able to run in this way. So one of the features we didn't implement was this ability to target a Windows installation that isn't running.

Folder scans

NPE 5.3 would only scan the selected folder and go no deeper. NPE 5.3 would often miss malicious files when doing a folder type of scan and would only detect files if selected via the file scan feature.

NPE 6.0 will follow all available directories and scan deeply and will not miss files like 5.3 did.

NPE 6.0 does not restrict what directories you can scan like 5.3 did. This does mean that a user could do damage to their computer.

Rootkit no longer default

NPE 5.3 would default to using the rootkit scan and thus required a reboot.

NPE 6.0 will default to having this feature turned off, which is what most people did anyways.

Localization

NPE 6.0 allows you to switch languages easily inside settings.

NPE requires command line arguments and the MUI build or a stand alone build just for the desired language.