Product Reviews

Norton 360 represented a revolution for its maker, Symantec, when it was released last year. It was faster than its Internet Security forerunners, and its near-silent interface was a huge improvement, meaning users had to do virtually no configuration when installing it for the first time. It had taken a while, but Symantec had finally realised that users wanted an anti-virus and firewall package that would do its job as quietly as possible with minimal impact on their PC's performance. This new version builds on the winning formula - but it's far from perfect.

A standard licence covers three PCs for a year and includes 2GB of online storage for backups (or 10GB for an extra tenner). The program carried out a virus and spyware scan before installing on our test PC, and the whole process was complete within 10 minutes. First time startup was also fuss-free; Norton automatically configured access for our applications without a single irritating pop-up alert. Internet Explorer, Windows Mail and the Napster music download program were allowed to go about their business without us having to fiddle about manually with firewall settings.

Norton 360 uses the same web protection, anti-malware and firewall modules as Norton Internet Security 2008, which has VB100 certification from Virus Bulletin, so we had no concerns about the level of protection provided. In our tests, all five recent threats on our machine were detected and removed. Where 360 differs from previous Norton Internet Security products is in its bandwidth use. While users previously reported

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daily downloads sometimes running into hundreds of megabytes, Norton 360 required minimal bandwidth.

The main control panel is clear and easy to understand, but can't match F-Secure (search for 189006) for sheer functional simplicity. There's too much Norton branded jargon that isn't adequately explained: for example, we doubt many users would know what 'SONAR monitoring' is supposed to mean.

Déja vu all over again

Like too many other security suppliers, Symantec has duplicated features of Windows. PC Tune Up, for instance, is nothing more than a rebranded version of the Windows Disk Defragmenter, and File Cleanup does the same job as Windows Disk Cleanup. Similarly, the Identity Protection feature claims to protect you from phishing websites, which trick you into entering personal details, but Internet Explorer already offers this function.

Identity Safe, which fills in online forms automatically and saves usernames and passwords for various websites under one master password, is a good idea in theory, but doesn't quite work. When we tested it with the login page of our online bank, it only filled in the username and password, then tried to log us in without completing the security checks. When using auto form fill on a registration page, Identity Safe tried to create another profile if it needed resubmitting. Auto Backup could be useful, but we found it too difficult to select individual files as opposed to all files of a certain type.

Program access alerts are turned off by default, reducing the number of unnecessary pop-ups, but pop-ups about new virus definitions were still far too frequent. Every time we restarted our PC, we were prompted to update the program. Keeping security software up to date is good, but why can't this take place in the background, as with the excellent F-Secure? Instead, LiveUpdate requires regular user intervention, and can't be set to update automatically.

Symantec is moving in the right direction in some ways, but needs to focus on the basics.