Norton Anti Virus

Norton AntiVirus

Norton Antivirus 2008 is a full featured antivirus and antispyware product. It includes several options that are commonly passed over by other suites while leaving many out that would be beneficial. The Norton scanning engine is one of the most complete on the market, but suffers from issues with system resource usage and overzealous integration with your computer that can cause freezing or simple hanging application.

Ease of Use:
Norton Antivirus 2008 is very easy to use. It comes with a default configuration that is sufficient to protect most home user systems. It integrates with the start bar with an icon that is large and easy to spot. The icon also includes a way to tell if your system is protected or needs intervention from the user.


Effectiveness:

Being VB100%, W.C.L 1 and 2, as well as ICSA certified means that Norton Antivirus 2008 is equipped to handle all of your virus scanning needs. The scanner has proven to 3 independent labs that it has the ability to detect and remove viruses and variants of all viruses that the Norton virus engine was tested against.

The antispyware capabilities of Norton Antivirus 2008 were less effective than the virus scanner. It missed all of our tests while finding only a single tracking cookie on our whole test system.

We noticed that Norton Antivirus still suffers from some pretty significant issues with the program eating up resources and just slowing down out test machine overall. This is something to keep in mind while making a decision on an antivirus solution.

Updates:
As of 2008, Norton Antivirus updates its virus signatures as needed. The averages on the web have mentioned time frames between once a day and 3 times a day where we experienced updates once a day during our testing period. This is a great improvement over the old system of looking for and installing updates only once a week.


Feature Set:
Norton Antivirus 2008 includes an antispyware scanner, Instant Messenger protection for MSN, Yahoo, AIM, and Trillian, as well as the ability to lock down program settings to help prevent other users on the computer from changing your settings. Symantec has still neglected to include parental controls with Norton Antivirus as well.


Ease of Installation:

While the installation of Norton Antivirus 2008 was rather long, it didn't require much intervention. It did require that we sign up for a Symantec account in order to complete the install. This account is used for downloading updates as well as keeping track of updates and other support information.

One additional thing to note is that uninstalling Norton Antivirus did not remove everything that was installed. There are several registry entries and directories left behind as well as the LiveUpdate program that has to be removed separately.

Help/Support:

Symantec has always been hit on their help and support by reviewers. This fine tradition doesn't end here as there seems to have been no changes since our Internet Security Suite review of Norton Internet Security. While they still offer free online chat and email support, their phone support option is still $9.95 per incident. Beyond this, they estimate a 30 minute wait time. We expect more for paid support options.

The live chat option is also much less useful than would be initially thought. It requires Internet Explorer to function as well as requiring an additional product install in order to get support. Once the application is installed, you still have to wait for a rep to come available. We stopped waiting after 25 minutes. For most people, this will probably be a bit more than they were looking to go through for support.

Summary:
Norton Antivirus 2008 is a good product for keeping your computer safe from viruses, but is not as effective as it should be against spyware. While it has a good track record of keeping viruses off of computers using it, it also has significant issues with slowing down computers that it is protecting. Symantec has done a lot to fix the slow down issues by reducing the amount of system resources used, but they still need to do more work to make the product a contender in the modern antivirus market.