Norton 360 TuneUp tasks vs. Windows 8 Maintenance

I have a few concerns about the function of Norton 360's tuneup tasks on Windows 8 machines.

 

1) When forcing the disk optimize utility on the performance page, the task seems to execute for a few seconds and then it stops. Is that due to low fragmentation percentage? It didn't use to be like this in older versions: when the button was pressed disk defragmenter started running untill it finished its job.

 

2) Does Norton clean up thumbnail cache? If yes, this is very annoying. Erasing thumbnails makes the preview of photos, documents and folders to load slowly when navigating through folders. If not, it must be a Windows bug.

 

3) Windows 8' automatic maintenance provides already built in tuneup improvements. It runs disk optimization on a weekly basis both for HDD (defrag) and SSD (trim) when the PC is idle. Running disk optimization once a week, even if disk fragmentation is low, prevents further fragmentation which is good! Norton on the other hand disables Windows' disk optimization tool and runs the defragmenter only when fragmentation is more that 10%. When I re-enable Windows' disk optimization, then I find it again disabled when Norton patches are installed (a few times a month).

 

4) Norton uses Windows' built in optimization tool, right?

 

5) Why doesn't Norton 360 provide more optimization tools? Can't it "borrow" some from Norton Utilities? At least the ones that are 100% safe to use. Shouldn't it provide more in terms of tuneup to justify its price and the actual difference between itself and Windows' built in maintenance tasks?

 

Thanks,

John

Norton 360 is geared to ‘regular’ home users that want protection and some basic utilities. Those that just want to use their system and not worry about what happens in the background.

Norton could bundle as many utilities as they wish, but most would be wasted on most users. The Norton Utilities suite is aimed at the users that want or need more control of their system.