norton utilities - clean your disks tool is dreadful

version 14.5.0.120

 

the Clean Your Disks tool is truly dreadful

 

1.

it cleans stuff you might not want it to:

the default is that everything is selected. if you're on the Windows tab and click Clean, it doesnt just clean stuff on that tab, it cleans everythig on the other 4 tabs too, such as browser history. this isnt obvious.

 

2

if you select it to clean an  application's recent file list, it also wipes the pinned shortcuts in your windows start menu, but doesnt remove recent files from the application's File menu.

 

3

there is no "deselect all" button, so if you want it to clean one plugin, such as Outlook's recent file list, you have to uncheck every other plugin in the list, which could be hundreds.

 

4

it claims to "permanently erase all traces of your online internet ... activity". it may well do that, but it also creates a log on your computer showing all the links to web sites it has removed, including the url's of those sites!

 

the Clean Your Registry is just as bad

if you go to one of the 12 categories that problems are placed into and click Repair, it repairs problems in all categories not just that one category. again this isnt at all obvious. to clean one category doesnt seem to be possible unless you individually uncheck all other problems. also there is no "select / deselect all" button. when i first ran this tool it found 40,000 problems and there was no easy way to repair just one category of problem - am i supposed to uncheck the thousands in "Deep scan" just to fix those in "Ad/remove programs"?

 

i'm surprised this program was ever released with such dangerous tools. i've run smart update but these issues remain.