Review: Norton Internet Security 2009

Norton has come up with a brand new Internet Security suite which they claim to be faster and lighter than it’s competitors. Recently Norton is involved in a big advertising campaign in most of the websites about their latest product. It can be recalled that the older versions were sluggish in performance.
We downloaded the trial version of Norton internet Security 2009 for review.
Installation
The download of the 66.6 MB setup file went on smoothly as the servers were fast. It took us just 2 minutes to install the product. The installation was simple with no hassles. We then made an update through it’s LiveUpdate service.

Interface
The user interface looks good with a changeable background color. Most features are ‘On/Off’ buttons and have access to ‘help’ right beside them.

Apart from showing the main features of Antivirus, Firewall and Identity Management on the main window, it also shows the CPU usage of system and Norton on the left panel. This is an optional feature.
Expanding this to a new window leads to graphical representation, from which we cant derive the actual amount of memory being used by Norton. Windows Taskbar still remains better choice! Also the LiveUpdate is a mere hyperlink lost in the crowded Window.

Features

Not so fast and not so light: Norton claims 80% faster scans than it’s rivals and only 6 MB idle time memory usage. But on our 3GHz CPU, 512MB RAM system, the scan of a 25GB hard disk took around 3 minutes which is only slightly faster than others in the market. The idle time memory usage was around 10 MB on average.

A sample virus in winrar archive was removed automatically during scan.

Norton is very aggressive in campaigning the fastness of it’s product, but ironically the elapsed time of a scan can no where be seen on the scan results window. You have to export the results to a text file to find it!

Computer settings: This section includes various settings for Scans, Real-time protection, and Live updates. Basic settings are given very fancy names which only leads to confusion for first time users. For e.g., the ‘Early Load’ could have been called ‘Auto-start’ and the SONAR advanced protection is nothing more than a real-time proactive defense!

Internet Settings: Internet Protection is feature rich with AntiSpam, Browser protection, Email Scan, Instant Messenger Scan, Intrusion Prevention and Smart Firewall.

Norton integrates it’s browser protection with popular browsers and gives warnings against sites containing malware. Its firewall protection is good for basic users as it gives the option of ‘Automatic Program Control’ in Advanced Settings which makes all decisions based on some preset Norton rules. This feature can be turned off by advanced users who would like to set their own rules.

The ‘AutoBlock’ feature of Intrusion Prevention turned to be a big puzzle for us as we could not figure out what would happen after the default protection time expires?

Identity settings: This allows users to setup Antiphishing and Identity protection. The ‘Norton Safe Web’ feature under these settings is an extension of the integrated browser protection and could have been better off placed under Internet settings.

Other security and display settings are available under Miscellaneous settings. Parental and Privacy Controls is a separate feature to be downloaded if required. It was not included in the trial pack downloaded by us.

Good

Norton Internet Security has a wide and advanced range of features not available in other security products. This is especially useful for advanced users who can optimize their security settings with the available flexibility. Norton Security 2009 is no doubt a good replacement of their outdated earlier products and a fierce competitor to the currently successful security products in the market.

Not So Good

Basic users may find this product difficult to configure given the confusing nomenclature and over-crowded features. Also some features like monitoring of inbound and outbound network traffic, prompting users before removal of suspicious files are missing.

Proactive defense certainly needs improvement. In our tests, Norton allowed installations of software belonging to unknown publishers on the system without any alerts. No options could be found to enable alerts and set rules for software installations.

CONCLUSION:

A good upgrade choice for Norton users. Time for Norton critics to reconsider their views!