How the Norton Desktop made Windows 3.x more usable!

I spent ages clicking around Windows 3 trying to work out how make icons for my own DOS apps. I remember spending loads of time on something called Object Packager before realizing it wasn't what I wanted; so often that was the case with early Windows, it had options to do things no one wanted and ludicrously missed options that plenty of people would have liked. Your batch file editing video idea sounds great.

Norton Desktop was his time fast forward. It was a great solution to work with. Greetings from Steven from the Netherlands

The Norton batch builder definitely deserves its own video.

I really like the look of Norton Desktop for DOS, as I'm a sucker for text-mode interfaces that use custom VGA characters to make it looks like it's in graphics mode. Excited for Central Point Desktop!

I'm loving this series on alternate Windows shells; I've never seen Norton Desktop before! I look forward to next week's video. I would love to see more on Norton Batch Builder as well. As I've said previously, all this software is a bit before my time, so it's super interesting to look back on it. Thank you!

Considering how shitty Windows 11's UI is, I guess alternative shells for Windows are very needed.

Great video, I like those old software reviews....I use them all of the time as it's kind of a hobby for me to collect them an try them as well on vm's as on real hardware...well done... another one please 🙂

I had Norton Utilities and Norton Editor on my computer at the office. Great tools I couldn't live without. Never found an editor that fitted me like a glove like NE.

I did not remember this but once the Disk Doctor animation came up I remembered it all. Ironically I instantly remembered the DOS version.

First time introduced to Windows 3.x was in October of 1992, I was 9 years old. Never had issues with the environment. Very easy for me. Windows 3.11 fWG was my main os until July 1998 when my father bought a PII with Windows 95OSR2.5.

I remember this one. But I mostly used Borland Dashboard before going to OS/2 2_1. Cheers!

As a kid, I was a huge fan of Quikmenu for DOS which has been on a shareware CD-ROM my dad bought back in the day. It felt nice, even had its own wallpapers and could easily be navigated using just the keyboard.

I absolutely loved NDW 3.0 and ran it on my Packard Bell Legend MultiMedia 486-SX/25 back in the day right up until midnight the day Windows 95 came out. :-) Today I'm running NDW version3.0 on a Pentium 266MMX w/ Windows for Workgroups (3.11) and also NDW 2.2 on a Compaq Portable III - 286 12mhz w/ Windows 3.1. ITS FREAKIN AWESOME! Thanks so much for creating your video. There's not a lot out there regarding NDW so I love it when new videos get posted. Really nice job!

I was a huuuuuuuuge Norton fan back then (especially DOS: Norton Utilities and Norton Commander, plus Norton Speeddrive as cache) and of course I also wanted to have Norton Desktop 3 for WIndows, promising to be more productive. It was not really good in my opinion. Yes it had tons of features, but it has drawbacks: for example, yes, it converts GRP groups from Program Manager to ND at install (and you can do that later also). But: then you are stuck: if you install any more WIndows programm, ND will not add the new icons, you always had to do that yourself, absolutely not comfortable. And I know it was programmatically possible even back then to intercept Program Manager creating new icons when a SETUP program wanted to do it, so no idea, why they didn't implement it. So the only comfortable way was to install NDW as the last program. Good idea, not a well done implementation. By the way I loved the design of Norton DOS tools so much (NDD, NU, NB, ...) that my own DOS programs also implemented the design, which I straightly cloned in Borland Pascal back then. :)

Yes, please do a deep dive on windows batch files from Norton Desktop!

D.O.S. release user here; I remember it as a cool looking piece of utilities suite back in the early 90s.What was super cool was the fact that it ran in graphical mode with detailed shadows and GUI effects (for that era of course).To me the D.O.S. version looked better than the win 3.1 version.

This video revived an old memory. You ever hear of some software called Plug-in for Windows? No, not a plug-in, but that's just what the software was called. It added nested groups to Program Manager itself and let you decorate your title bars with a clock and other things. Seems like it might be something you'd like to check out and maybe make a video on.

Love these videos. Up until this very moment, I never thought about how odd it is that Microsoft never really evolved batch files for Windows in any meaningful way.

I used Norton Desktop 3.0 on our first PC, a Pentium 60 with resolutions up to 1600x1200. It was extremely fast and I enjoyed it very much. Then one day someone copied the 14 diskettes of Windiws 95 for me. I still miss Norton Desktop.

They put a lot of effort into the advanced TUI framework for Nortons Utilities so I'm not surprised they seem to have used it for some other things like Norton Desktop for DOS. Text mode dos applications trying to be Windows like always fascinated me