Norton antivirus 2012 review

Symantec’s Norton AntiVirus is the world’s most trusted antivirus solution. Norton AntiVirus 2012 offers the same level of protection along with new features and improvements. It removes viruses and security risks automatically; heuristically detects spyware threats, detects and blocks Internet worm attacks, and protects email.

Norton AntiVirus from Symantec is one of the best anti-virus software titles in the world. Enjoy the security of automatic protection against viruses, malicious ActiveX controls and Java applets, and other dangerous code. It protects you while you’re surfing the Internet or getting information from floppy disks, CDs, or a network. It also automatically scans incoming attachments in the most popular email programs. It is extremely easy to keep updated, with automatic retrieval of new anti-virus definitions from Symantec as often as once a week.

Performance

After you review the list of features in an antivirus software product, the essential questions remain: How well does it protect? How good is it at repair? Is it highly usable or not? Has anyone objectively tested it? Norton AntiVirus received the West Coast Labs Checkmark for antivirus desktop and anti-Trojan tests. It also achieved the Advanced Award from AV Comparatives in August 2011.

It is significant that Norton is AV-Test Certified. AV-Test is a respected independent laboratory in Germany that tests antivirus software and researches the best products and procedures to detect malware. The test network in the lab is quite elaborate with a couple of dozen servers and almost 300 workstations. The lab has collected 100 million pieces of clean test data and 50 million pieces of malicious test data during the past 15 years. Every day, AV-Test adds 50,000 new pieces of malware to its collection of malicious test data. AV-Test results place Norton AntiVirus software in the top 20th percentile for usability and protection on Windows XP.

Installation

For the third year in a row, Norton’s formerly sluggish beast offers a smooth and fast installation operation. Once you run the installer, the program is ready to operate in about a minute–impressively fast, and doubly so considering past performance. The installation process is also the first time that you will interact with Quorum, Norton’s behavior-based detection engine. You’ll be asked to participate by sending anonymous data to Symantec’s cloud. Opting out of the data submission, according to Symantec, will not affect your security.

Running the trial of Norton also requires registering the program. Like many programs, Norton used to force open your default browser and take you to the company’s registration Web site. Now you can register from within the program. Uninstalling the software left about 10 Registry entries behind, but no other traces were detectable. Overall, Norton’s installation experience was fast and hassle-free, with a minimum of configuration options–but the ones that did come up appeared necessary.

Help & Support

Customer support is available online or by live chat, telephone and email 24/7.

Management of your Norton products is now cloud based, so you can install, transfer, update or renew Norton product subscriptions from anywhere on the internet.

Security Performance and PC Impact

According to AV-Test, Norton Internet Security 2012 performed very well, just not as well as some of the other suites we tested. In the malware detection test, Internet Security was able to identify 98.94 percent. While that’s higher than the average of 97.3, Bitdefender’s Total Security 2012 caught everything, and Kaspersky caught 99.4 percent.

When it came to cleaning up malware, Norton Internet Security performed especially well, clearing out 83 percent of threats, better than Bitdefender’s 80.7 percent cleanup rate. Like Bitdefender, Internet Security didn’t produce any false positives and was able to successfully about to block 100 percent of all suspected malware infections.

A Quiet Mode limits interruptions from Internet Security 2012 based on a set list of parameters. Three settings include Silent Mode, which you turn on manually and runs for a set amount of time; Full-Screen Detection, which activates Silent Mode when a movie or game is running in full-screen mode; and Quiet Mode, which activates Silent Mode whenever it detects that you are recording something with Windows Media Center TV Recorder or are burning a disk.

Requirements:

• 300 MHz or faster processor
• 256 MB of RAM (512 MB RAM required for the Recovery Tool)
• 150 MB of available hard disk space.
• Email scanning supported for POP3- and SMTP-compatible email clients.Required for all installations:
• CD-ROM or DVD drive (if not installing via electronic download)
• Support for AntiSpam feature
• Microsoft Outlook 97 or later
• Microsoft Outlook Express 6.0 or later
• Browser support for Browser Protection feature
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 32-bit 6.0 or higher
• Mozilla Firefox 2.0 or higher

Limitations:

• 30 days trial
• Nag screen

CONCLUSION:

Norton AntiVirus 2012 is packed with new features. And while not every addition to 2012 is a home run, we were impressed with the effort that Symantec invested in differentiating its entry level paid anti-virus platform from the competition. Just as impressively, Symantec managed to include so many new enhancements while improving its stellar performance times. Norton seems destined to remain one of the best antivirus packages of 2012.