I was impressed last year when Symantec stripped its suite down to nuts and bolts and reassembled it into Norton Internet Security 2009. Engineers scrutinized every piece before putting it back into the product. Is it as efficient as possible? Is it even necessary? Can we do it differently? The end result really did bear out the company's claims of minimal system impact... and it was also darn effective at its job of protection. Norton Internet Security 2010 adds even more protection while keeping a light touch on your resources, and it fixes a couple of long-term (if minor) embarrassments.
Embarrassments first. For years, the antispam in Symantec's suite has been dreadful, both discarding too much valid mail and letting too much spam into the Inbox. The Symantec folks admit they thought client-side spam filtering was fading out; they were wrong. So in the 2010 suite they pulled some technology from their Enterprise-level antispam; hooray! The suite's parental control was also painfully limited. Sure, not everyone needs it, but those who do deserve better. Now each suite license also gets you a license for the vastly superior OnlineFamily.Norton, which is free for all at present but won't be after January.
Every Norton installation whose owner doesn't opt out of data collection becomes a source of information for Symantec's huge databases. A new technology it calls "quorum", active now in the 2010 suite, uses these databases for powerful protection against zero-day and polymorphic malware. It uses statistical techniques to identify processes that may be malware and watches those processes with extra care. It certainly works--the suite set new records in my malware removal and blocking tests.
I was also quite impressed with the ease of installing Norton even on malware-infested test systems. The one-click install really is fast and simple, and when the installer ran into problems it solved them for itself. That's how it should be! For full details, read my review. - Neil J. Rubenking.
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