Miscellaneous Reviews

    Then they called and sold me on the idea of their Voice Plus continuous speech recognition system.  Now they told me this was originally over a $200 program and that I could speak to it naturally and it would type for me.  I bought it and after the initial setup I discovered that after 4 days of working with it that it was not much smarter than it was after the original setup.  I could power it up, it is a memory hog.  It would start out getting the first sentence correct, even the second then by the third sentence it would start missing words.  After bringing up the correction mode of the software it would then fail to understand even the most simple words.  I complained to the company rep over the phone that it just doesn't work right.  They said keep working with it, it will eventually learn your speech patterns and will work.  I tried for several more days with no improvement.  I finally quit messing with it until recently and tried again with the same results as before.  I sent them a message asking for help and getting no response.   I talked with another company representative that works with Naturally Speaking continuous voice recognition systems who told me that L&H had among the very worst of all the speech recognition systems available to the consumers today.  At this point in time I must warn anyone wanting a speech recognition system to try some other brand.

    Until then I will be looking around for a speech recognition system that really works produced by a company that will actually support their product.  Naturally Speaking says they have the very best and the man who I talked with was helpful to explain things and to answer my questions while the L&H people appear to be avoiding my messages and not warning to help me.

    The Naturally Speaking fellow also told me that he believed the L&H representative actually misrepresented the software to me in order to get me to buy it.  Since L&H has not tried to help me solve my problems with their software and since they have yet to answer my messages I am inclined to believe the man may have been telling me the truth.  I'm still waiting to hear from them, but I'm not going to wait much longer before I do something about it.

The system doctor finds errors on your hard drive that do not exist and when you tell it to fix these errors as the program suggests it can total your entire hard drive and operating system.  This will require you to rebuild your hard drives up from the low level format and recreate the foundations upon which all data and FAT tables are kept.  A BACKUP copy of your system will be of no use to you until you do these things.  I am speaking from experience here, but I'm not the only one who has suffered the loss of important files and time lost at the expense of trying to use this set of utilities.

When checking for TSR's (terminal stay resident programs) in your RAM, Norton can find things in there that aren't even there.  Windows 95 says I have 5 TSR's in my RAM but Norton can find 9 or 10.  Only 5 of which are really there.

When installing the program it asks you if you want Norton's protected trash bin installed.  You can tell it no that you do not and it will install it anyway.  What this does is that when you are removing things from your hard drive to get more disk space Norton will make sure you can't remove it. It installs a second "trash bin" on your computer in order to prevent you from removing unwanted items.  Even items that are emptied from the Windows trash bin are being held on the hard drive by Norton's. Then it will tell you that you have more disk space than you actually have.  You must then go empty the Norton's trash bin separately and hope that it actually removes it.  In most cases it does but in some tests we found the files that should have been removed were still taking up space on the hard drives.

I have tested two different versions of this software utility.  The current version that I have does not even tell what version it is.  It only says "Norton for Windows 95" on it.  No version information could be found on the box either.  If version information exists with this software I wish someone would tell me where to locate it and I could update this review.

Because of the destructive nature of this set of utilities and inaccurate data I do not recommend this product.  I not only do not recommend it but must warn you that if you use these utilities you may damage your computer system.

It is also suppose to update itself from the web, which turned out to be a huge joke, once again designed to separate the user from their money.

Yes it can find some problems with your computer system and yes it can fix a few of these problems.  However many other "little things" that can cause huge problems for a computer user are totally over-looked by this software.

No I do not recommend this software product.  I did this review several months ago and I have rebuilt my computer since then thanks to testing of other software/hardware that wiped my O.S. out.  I may retest this product in the future to give more details as to why I do not recommend it.

It is a snap to set up.  Comes with web editing software and many plug-ins and features.  The Netscape web site has smart update features that allow a user to simply log on and add plug-ins and other user features automatically.

Recently they have changed a few things on the web site for which I had to send them a message scolding them for certain changes that places distance between them and their customers.  For example, I am a registered user on their site yet the last time I logged on, their site asked me for all kinds of information they all ready had on me.  It acted as if it didn't even know me.  Before, I could log in and out of Smart Update without problems.  Now I can't even get in there at all.  It asked me to go to Verisign to get a new Certificate, yet my Verisign certificate is not more than 2 months old.  Still no word from Netscape webmaster on this new set of problems.

It is the slowest of all the web browsers I have tested and takes up the most hard dive space.   I removed the software from my computer and in the process it wiped out my operating system causing me to have to start over from scratch and build a new OS from the ground up in order to be rid of it.

Once this program is installed on your computer it wants to say there.   And like Microsoft it wants to dominate your computer system.  In some cases it keep other web browsers from working correctly.

Several security flaws have been discovered in this software product that enable certain hackers' web sites, MSN, AOL, and Microsoft to read out personal information from your hard drives.  I have the news reports on my hard drive that will testify to these facts and I may even put them on the web site here later on for everyone to read.  Microsoft said it was a HOAX and that no security flaws were in their software yet different researchers discovered the flaws and reported these things to the news media.  It appears to me that Microsoft lied.

I mention AOL because the AOL software is powered by Microsoft I.E.  Similar or even the same security flaws were found in AOL software.  AOL said it was a HOAX designed to drive people away from AOL, yet the first time I logged on with my new AOL for Windows 95 before AOL would allow me to log off it spent about 10 min updating itself for what it described as "correction for a security flaw" in the AOL 3.0 for Windows 95 software.  If it really was AOL that sent that message then AOL also lied.