Norton 2009

Posted on: November 27th, 2008

In the last couple of days I got news of some positive changes in Symantec’s Norton products. Yesterday I had a chance to check it out personally. It looks like Symantec finally listened to what users wanted: speed for their computer.

Norton 2009 (antivirus/antispyware & internet security) is now geared toward being quick and efficient and not hogging the computers resources. Here’s what I saw:

The computer I was working on was about 4-5 year old machine, 512MB of RAM, with Norton Antivirus/Antispyware 2009 installed. The computer booted up in a very reasonable amount of time. Norton didn’t seem to noticeably delay the boot up and it’s status icon showed up about 30 seconds after the desktop appeared. When clicked on the icon to show the user interface it came up in seconds.

One noticeable sign of the efficiency efforts was the CPU usage meter that showed what percentage of the CPU was used by the system and Norton. Further links got me to a page where it showed the amount of memory used by system & Norton. Checking the performance tab of the Windows task manager confirmed that it, in fact, uses much less memory than earlier versions. All interaction with the user interface was speedy.

As far as detection and removal capabilities concerned: This still has some room for improvement. Norton was installed on the computer after it showed obvious signs of infections. Norton failed to clear these out (that’s why I was called in). I removed over a dozen infected files that I recognized with my tools and got the computer back to working. I ran Norton scan on these files after they were deactivated and Norton found 8 total infected files. I made sure Norton was fully updated before running the scan. Norton also hung up during the first scan and it had to be terminated with the task manager, then it claimed that there were unresolved threats. Checking its history I had to dig 3 screens deep into each item to find out what it was referring to and in each case it was a file that was already removed by the scan I repeated. When trying to remove the already removed threats it hung up on all three occasions. After a reboot though it cleared itself.

Conclusion: Symantec finally answered the prayers of its users and made a much more slick and efficient antivirus/security software. Some kinks still need to be worked out but I’m impressed with the improvements, having seen the earlier version.
Norton, now, is no longer in the “avoid it at all costs” category, into the “fairly good one” as far as I’m concerned.

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