The Software Corner

When it comes to making a name for itself in the industry, besides Microsoft, Symantec has become synonymous with home security products for over the years. Look around at any computer store or office supplies store, you will see Symantec products everywhere.

But does popularity mean that the product is good? Heck no, far from it. As anyone can see if you even read a little bit of technology news, hackers target Windows products whether it is the operating system itself, Internet Explorer or even Office, since these products are quite popular the payoff is bigger.

Norton products are in the same boat, Norton Antivirus and Norton Internet Security are quite popular amongst its fans, but even in the recent past, users of Norton Antivirus have been targetted by attacks as well. Knowing this, how has Symantec’s latest release of Norton Antivirus fair against viruses and spyware?

For those who want to try before you buy, Symantec offers a 15-day full trial of its latest offerings so you can get a feel of how the newest product performs. For download link and more information view the Norton 2007 product release page.

How the product was tested

Testing is the easiest thing, as I have stated for all this time IE itself is an easy way to get spyware and viruses installed onto your system if you go to those bad websites and so I did. Norton did not pop up as much as it has in previous versions to warn you about a bad file being installed nor does it ask you for a decision of a program to access the Internet.

Also what was looked at is performance time, unfortunately, I was not able to obtain a trial version of NAV 2006 to verify if the statements of NAV 2007 being faster was true or not; but scan time was looked at on this review.

Configuration

Configuration is something that can either be tricky to do or made quite easy. Luckily, NAV 2007 does have defaults that are set to adequately protect your system while avoiding much hassle. I recalled previous versions of NAV where heuristics was not set high and that would allow potential spyware and viruses to infect your system.

The layout of the configuration page is straight forward and there isn’t really much of a reason to be there.

Performance

When installed on a fresh system with only the basic programs installed (Firefox, and Office 2007 beta) the amount of time to complete a full system scan was somewhat high. It took about 15 minutes to complete and that is an extremely long wait.

When it came to doing a quick scan, its results were also not the greatest in the amount of time it took to complete. Everytime there was a virus or spyware caught, it is necessary to atleast perform a quick scan to verify if there were more files infected since last scan.

Other slowdowns were quite noticeable when trying to view other menu options and also as stated below, when a scan was finished and choosing what you wanted to do took quite a bit of time.

There were on some occasions the necessity to scan multiple times to remove the same threat, eventhough, NAV did state the threat was fixed (removed). NAV was somewhat clumsy in that there was a BHO (Browser Hijacker) installed and the spyware that caused it was removed; so once I opened up IE, it was still defaulting to a website I did not want. What might seem a little odd also is the fact that when it removed a different spyware, Norton in itself decided to change the homepage from blank to a specific page on its website!

Conclusion

I found it quite annoying that Norton decided to install some type of “notification” system next to the system tray in Windows XP. It is something that is not necessary and should be replaced by either a “traffic light” system (that was used in their products during the late 90’s) or warning colors to show that there are updates or a full system scan has to be completed.

I do not find anything special about how their performance was improved, it was still slow even when clicking next after doing a virus scan. Its detection mechanism was somewhat improved since it actually did remove a spyware toolbar but it still did not fully clean a spyware threat after doing one complete scan.

Just like in the past, NAV 2007 cannot be easily uninstalled. That in itself I find that should be immediately addressed and not have to download the Norton uninstaller tool to remove Symantec products.

Norton is still resource heavy and obviously slowed system startup time dramatically, but since I cannot make an accurate comparison with NAV 2006, I cannot state whether it uses less resources upon startup.

Overall, Norton still have a lot of room to improve, and their techniques for removing threats still doesn’t impress me so much.