News 

A UK launch isn't due until March, and will cost £59.99 inc VAT. In the US the software costs $79.99, around two-thirds the UK price at £41.

However, there is nothing preventing UK users from downloading the US version direct from Symantec's site and paying the £41 price instead. The US download is currently available for $10 less than the estimated retail price at $69.99.

With Norton 360, Symantec says it is attempting to tackle the information overload of much of the consumer security software available today. Tom Powlege, Senior Director, Product Management, Consumer Products and Solutions, told us Symantec includes Microsoft in that category.

'We've tried to make our product very quiet,' he said. 'With features like UAC (user account control, in Windows Vista), there are a lot of alerts, a lot of prompting. [Users] become numb to them, and we expect virus writers will use more social engineering tactics in response.

'Virus writers implement features that take advantage of that numbness to click the buttons to make it go away. This is why we're trying to make our products more intelligent rather than using brute force. It drives them nuts.'

Norton 360 is designed with a hands off approach for its users, with the emphasis on the software

New features of the software include a far smaller resource footprint, using just two processes consuming around 7MB of memory in total. It also runs many processes during system idle times, scanning for low use of CPU and hard disks, or an absence of user sessions to start resource-hugging services such as system scans.

Its Sonar technology scans active processes for malicious characteristics, which is intended to make it able to detect new types of code for which Symantec might not yet have a signature to match against.

Powledge said that Sonar had already turned up 'whole new families of spyware that we didn't have signatures for before.' He claimed a false positive rate of less than half of one per cent.

He said that Sonar is a vital part of any security software, as virus writers quickly write new variants of malicious code in order to stay ahead of the signature databases of the likes of Symantec, McAfee and others. '[Virus writers] are clearly using our products to test against,' he said.

Norton 360 also makes good use of technology derived from Symantec's acquisition of storage giant Veritas to add in low level system access to the physical disk and protect against root kits.

The system also includes backup and restore facilities, with a full 2GB of secure online backup included for free.

Alongside the virus and spyware detection and removal, Norton 360 also includes a smart, two-way firewall, intrusion detection, browser vulnerability checking, network address checking and password strength checks. It also blocks tracking cookies and offers network-based intrusion prevention scanning, as well as detecting phishing attacks and other authentication problems.

Finally, Symantec has surfaced its tech support more prominently, making it more straightforward to make direct contact with Symantec support staff 24/7.