Norton Ghost 14.0 [Old Version]

As Ive noted elsewhere, I am not one of the worlds great computer mavens. Therefore I can only offer a very lay opinion. But, in that context, Ghost 14.0, the follow-up to 12, apparently (and REALLY, are we still all such victims of triskadeckaphobia (sic)... REALLY?) seems to be evertything its creators claim. It installs easily; backs up what its supposed to (and some things you wouldnt even think of) and feels just about right in giving the user confidence in its capabilities. What more can one want?

Ghost has followed the footsteps of the other Norton products and declined in quality over the years. The feature set is not that great and the gui is awful. It does the job its supposed to but many of the extra features arent that useful.

Works very well to back up my entire operating system of Windows XP after reading between the line on the instructions. The instructions could be a little clearer for system backup. When finished it gives an exact backup of your disk drive, I backup to a spare IDE drive and a USB drive. I am bummed that Ver 14.0 wont work with Windows 7 without buying a newer version

After wasting two days trying to copy my old hard drive to a new hard drive, I gave up using this tool for that purpose. I think the problem was the new HD was formatted incorrectly to be a bootable drive. The software has a Copy Master Boot Record option, but it never made the drive bootable. This software never tells you the result will not be bootable. Even if it did there is no option to repartition the HD with either Ghost or plain XP options. If you want to migrate your primary HD to a new larger HD, use Acronis Migrate Easy since it is half the price and has the ability to adjust your partitions to be bootable. I think Norton wants this to be purely backup software. As a backup software its buggy. If you have SQL Server installed, you probably run into the COM Surrogate error. I hate the way the software is presumptuous. I didnt need a LiveUpdate in the control panel. Ghost gives you a startup tray app that scans HDs on startup. This slows up the bootup and I dont see how you can turn it off. Since backup software comes with Windows not sure this is worth $70.

This product works great for backups and for recovering a PC that is infected by a virus. My PC was recently infected by an Internet Virus. The ones that scams you to pay them so they can remove it. I did have antivirus software running but it did not catch the infection, or my family could have said yes to one of those scam popup. The Virus is smart and very elusive so I ended up having to reload windows and spend the next few days putting everything back together. If it happened to you, then you know what I am talking about. If I had Norton Ghost 14, it would have been an hours task. Purchase this software and immediately create and image of your PC to an external Hard Drive. Keep it up-to-date with the Norton utility, and you never have to worry again. Get the CD version so you can boot from the CD to do the recovery. It works and you will be a hero with your family or business. If your PC is infected, or you loaded software that you should not have, just boot from the CD and re-image the PC to the last time you backed it up. Not to mention it works great for normal back and restore functions.

Ive given up on Symantec products. Norton Ghost 14.0 has worked erratically from the start, on a variety of machines with a variety of hardware and OS configurations. The tech support staff in Bangladesh invariably conclude that uninstalling and reinstalling is the answer to your problem, no matter how many times youve done it. Youll get similar responses for Norton 360, which is even worse. I wash my hands of it, and I hope you never get your hands dirtied by this product.

Product as described received quickly

Works well and reliably. I upgraded from version 9 which worked well for many years, but isnt compatible with Vista. Norton support was there when I needed them. I can only compare it to MS back-up which never worked for me when I needed it. Dont bother with MS.

Ive used past versions of Norton Ghost to do backups and recoveries when they are needed and I have found the software to do what it says it will but its not the most intuitive product in the world. Having said that, I think that the older versions were better overall. The interface was very simple but it seemed to lighten the bells and whistles stuff and stuck to the basics. I think that with the new interface the product looks nicer but when you try to do too much and release a product too early it can cause problems. After reading other reviews regarding bugs and problems using the software I will have to say be careful. The backups that I did worked fine and I didnt have problems but with multiple warnings out there on the web I cant give this more than a 3 star rating. Ghost will do backups but theres too many warning signs to make this a recommended purchase. ***

This is one of the few software apps available that can backup your system AND help you upgrade to a bigger internal hard drive. Usually when attempting to swap out your entire main hard drive (C: drive with the operating system on it) you can only upgrade to an identical size partition, so what is the point?!. Norton Ghost lets you back up your current main C; drive on a separate disk, even a USB drive!, swap out your main drive to a higher performance and bigger drive, and then load your backup to the newly installed hard drive. Norton at this point lets you select if you want to make the new partition use the full new drive size, then it works flawlessly to do what it says. I updated an old laptop with a 32gb drive to a 250gb 5400rpm (PATA) drive and my performance improved 6 fold. Highly recommended. Oh yes, the incremental backups are fast too after you capture the first disk image.