Overview

Norton Antivirus 2010 defends your PC against viruses, spyware, bots, worms, and other malware without slowing things down or getting in your way. For faster, less frequent scans, intelligence-driven technology identifies and targets only files at risk. Vulnerability protection prevents threats from exploiting security holes in the PC software. Pulse Updates that occur every 5-15 minutes and real-time online security checks help ensure continuous, up-to-the-minute protection against the latest threats.

Installation

Installation is fairly straight forward following the install wizard. During the process you will be prompted to create a Norton account.

After installation has completed and you’ve created your Norton account, you’re PC is protected and you can start using the program.

Features

The new user interface is quite cool and nicely laid out providing easy use.

Norton Insight Network provides additional protection by identifying new threats from the Norton Community.

Norton Insight is able to increase performance by not scanning trusted files added to a whitelist.

File Insight is a feature that tells you where files and apps come from and if they are trusted.

In the Settings you can control Computer, Network, and Miscellaneous settings by turning them on or off and some services can be configured in detail.

Each section has its own settings and they are easy to enable or disable and configure. Here is a look at some Network settings where you can also configure the communications port and create a network map.

A monthly Report displays every 30 days and shows you how Norton has been working and had done for that time period. It also lets you review the latest news on Internet security.

You can access different options quickly from the icon in the system tray.

Additional Features:

• Antispyware
• Antirootkit
• Bot Protection
• Recovery Tool
• Browser Protection
• Network Monitoring and more…

Ease of Use

This new version of Norton Antivirus has improved in several ways and one of them is its ease of use. Everything is laid out very logically making it intuitive to navigate and run.

You can run quick, Full, and Custom Scans.

While the scan is running you can monitor the progress and details of the scan.

When the scan has completed you can get detail results and export the data into a report.

If you want to allow a file for some reason because it is a false positive, you can restore it from Quarantine through the File Insight feature.

Right-click a file to scan it using Norton from the Context Menu.

After an individual file scan File Insight opens up with information about the file and you can select to Trust now so it is added to the whitelist of trusted files. Adding large files to the Norton Insight list to save time when running scans.

You can shut down Norton entirely for a period of time if you need to or can shut off individual services as well.

Performance

We ran our tests on a Windows 7 system with a dual core processor and 4GB of RAM and Quick scans were relatively fast and took up reasonable resources. The full scan is a bit more intensive and you will notice lag while multi-tasking and running a scan at the same time. Of course you should schedule scans for when you’re away from the computer.

The real-time protection doesn’t interfere with your daily computing however, and you can monitor the amount of system resources being taken up from the main interface.

Here is an example of system resource usage when idle and employing real-time protection.

You can also monitor performance with the System Insight feature.

Product Support

The product support page provides support through several means like FAQ, Knowledgebase, Downloadable Manuals, and through the Norton Community. They also have online chat and email support as well to get your questions answered from a support tech quickly.

They also offer product tutorials on their site for Antivirus and Internet Security to help you navigate through the new features.

Conclusion

This could be considered the best version of Norton Antivirus yet with an easy to control interface, enhanced level of detail, and speed in performance. It provides great default protection out of the box which makes it simple to use for basic computer users. There are a lot of configurable settings and features inside to allow power users to tweak it exactly how they like. Keep in mind that this doesn’t offer the total set of security features offered in the Internet Security suite, and can only be used on one machine, where Internet Security allows installation on three machines. They offer a free 30 day trial and is $39.99 after that for a full license. If you’re familiar with Norton products you will be quite happy with this new version. If you are looking for quality protection and easy configuration in your Antivirus utility, you can’t go wrong with this latest offering from Norton.

Works on Windows XP SP2 (32-bit), Vista (32 & 64-bit), and Windows 7 (32 & 64 bit)

Rating

• Installation: 8
• Ease of Use: 8
• Features: 8
• Performance: 8
• Product Support: 8