Norton 360 v2 in Software

The antispam module works well enough, but next to AVG's offering it looks very limited. You get a slider control to choose between five degrees of strictness, but it's not clear what it is you're controlling. Integration is limited to Outlook and Outlook Express, too. Still, there are some useful options: you can, for example, ask it to block messages containing HTML forms, invisible text, remote images or scripts.

Finally, the parental controls consist simply of a website blocker and logger. Norton scores over Vista's web limiter by offering a database of sites, so you can easily block or allow access to sites by type, rather than by specifying URL. The default blacklist surprised us, though: we can understand keeping children away from "weapons", but why "travel" and "job search"?

We came away from Norton 360 v2.0 a little disappointed. It excelled where it matters most, with an exemplary malware detection score and it's nice to have online backup thrown in. But it's behind the curve in terms of both slickness and configurability.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith