Labs

Norton AntiVirus has been around for years and there's a good chance you've used it at some point. Symantec is the market leader worldwide, closely followed by McAfee. You'd think such a popular product would be astoundingly good at detecting viruses. However, in previous tests we've found its detection abilities to be patchy. Our latest tests are more stringent than ever before and the results are nothing less than shocking.

Norton AntiVirus only detected 75 per cent of the email viruses that we downloaded to the target system. This is the same number as its rival McAfee, but far fewer than lesser-known brands such as Kaspersky, F-Secure and Panda.

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For the number one anti-virus program in the world to detect only three-quarters of a sample of real, current viruses is scandalous.

The web-based threat test was nearly as disheartening. Norton AntiVirus detected 28 per cent of the files, making it more accurate than McAfee VirusScan but significantly less effective than most of its competitors. When a free anti-virus utility detects nearly twice as many you know that something is very wrong.

Symantec has changed the look and feel of Norton AntiVirus. We preferred the old interface to the new one, which feels a bit like navigating a webpage using hyperlinks rather than a regular program with buttons. It's not a real problem, though, and it is possible to view all the important settings from one place.

Norton AntiVirus's results are almost exactly average in this labs test, although they are much lower than the best on offer. If you are happy to have a basic level of protection then this program will do the job, but it's worth remembering that you are going to pay for the privilege. The full, official price of £40 can be reduced to £27 if you buy from Amazon.co.uk, but we'd rather pay even less for Steganos and get much better protection into the bargain.