This week I have mostly been in Madrid, trying not to laugh when someone said: “Security products are too slow” or, and this one is worth waiting for, “People shouldn’t tolerate a security product with poor performance.”

The reason for my exercise in ROFL-stifling being that the person saying this happened to be none other than Rowan Trollope, the Vice President of Consumer Business at Symantec. In Madrid to oversee the official launch of Norton Internet Security 2009.

Look, my Grandma can suck eggs real well, they do not need coal in Newcastle, and everyone knows that Norton is a slow, poor performing security product. Right? Well no, not really.

My Grandma is dead. There are plenty of people in Newcastle who would appreciate some free coal thanks very much. And Norton has changed.

OK, now it is you who is laughing, I can just tell. But it is true, and I will say it again so as to make you believe me: look into my eyes, not around my eyes, but into my eyes – Norton is not a resource hogging system slowing security solution.

At least, not any more. If my initial impressions after installing the product on my return from Madrid are anything to go by, and they do concur with independent testing labs and benchmarkers results I have to say, then Symantec has pulled off a pretty good party trick. It has reinvented Norton Internet Security 2009 into something that is actually quite compelling as a consumer security product.

It really does install, with a single click, in less than a minute on an average Windows powered PC.

It really does consume less CPU cycles in real world usage than other products of this type.

It really does scan for problems in less time than those other products as well.

It really is dead easy to use, silent when you want it to be, configurable if you need it to be.

But the icing upon the cake, and a prompt for one more laughter filled saying, came over breakfast before I left Madrid. Con Mallon the Director, Regional Product Marketing, Symantec Consumer Business Unit said with a very straight face that “Norton Internet Security 2009 uninstalls cleanly and quickly.”

I will run that past you one more time: Norton uninstalls cleanly, says a Symantec executive.

I have heard the joke before, of course, and always find it amusing. However, this time, Symantec gets the last laugh. Con Mallon was right, Symantec seems to have fixed the Norton uninstall problem.

It’s early days yet, and I may have been lucky with my copy and my test machine, but you know what? I think Symantec has got serious about consumer security at last…