NORTON 360 ALL IN ONE SECURITY
Norton 360 is the perfect match for our online habits. Connect securely from any wireless hotspot, knowing that Norton 360 protects against snoopers, viruses and more. Your ID is protected by advanced transaction security. Websites are authenticated to ensure that you are not targeted by fake websites designed to steal your identity. If you play online games, with Norton 360 you don't have to switch off your firewall. Best of all, the backup option enables you to save and restore files with ease whilst the PC tuneup helps you to optimise your PCs performance. If your subscription is current, you'll receive updates and upgrades free of charge.
PRODUCT REVIEW
Security as a service is the latest trend to trickle down from the enterprise sector into the affordable realm of the home consumer. We've already witnessed Microsoft doing spectacularly badly with its Windows Live OneCare offering for Vista, failing to pass the Virus Bulletin VB100 certification tests and then coming an embarrassing last, by some margin, in the well-respected AV-comparatives.org test of 17 apps. With many security applications not yet even compatible with Vista, can Symantec make a better impression with its brand-new Norton 360?
First impressions are certainly good, with the coded-from-scratch suite not only installing more quickly, but consuming far less in the way of system resources than Norton Internet Security 2007. This is thanks to the improved background scheduler that monitors user input, CPU usage and disk activity, throttling tasks accordingly; initiating remaining scans, backups or system tuning only when idle time parameters are met. Even LiveUpdate, much maligned for its clunky update mechanism, is tamed. Both require less in the way of resources and are much better integrated - to the point that most of the time we didn't know they were running: exactly how it should be. At 300MB, the suite also takes up less disk space than OneCare, although the same 256MB of RAM is required. Thankfully, on the systems we tested (both XP and Vista), uninstallation was just as painless.
We also approve of the pared-down components that have made it into Norton 360. The downloadable Anti Spam and Parental Control add-in pack weren't yet available for us to test, but given that they'll retain the same basic features of the NIS2007 add-in pack, it's no great loss. When it comes to sheer effectiveness, the silent firewall and Anti Virus/Anti Spyware perform just as well as they did when we tested NIS2007. Both do the job quietly and efficiently, with no false positives, no nagging alerts and dialogs, and protection from every threat we threw at them. And that includes the patent-pending VxMS rootkit protection technology acquired from Veritas, as well as the SONAR behavioural malware detection system for real-time threat protection. There's also transactional security (for Internet Explorer users, at least), combining blacklist and heuristic phishing protection techniques with website authentication to ensure at-a-glance identification of dangerous websites. Norton 360 will even automatically check if your system passwords are weak and recommend you replace them.
Also, the backup and restore feature brings something to the party that Microsoft's OneCare doesn't, and that's online storage. Unfortunately, there's only 2GB of it, although you can buy additional bundles at £15 (inc VAT) for 5GB, £26 for 10GB and £36 for 25GB - not the most cost-efficient option.
We have no complaints about the licence cost of Norton 360, though: covering three installations on separate PCs, it represents great value for money
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