Norton Internet Security 2009

by Tony Bradley • August 1, 2009 • Product Reviews

Rating

The Bottom Line

Symantec has long held a position as one of the major players in antivirus and PC security products. One complaint users have about computer security software, but particularly with Symantec, has been the size of the install and the way it bogs the system down. Often the trade-off of performance is not considered worth it to protect the computer. Symantec has taken those issues to heart in creating Norton Internet Security 2009- it is smaller, and faster, and yet still offers all of the protection of its predecessors and then some.

Pros

Faster and lighter than previous versions of Norton Internet Security
White listing feature allows you to designate applications as trusted
Quick and intuitive installation and configuration
Pulse updates keep system up to date every 5 minutes

Cons

Confusing to choose between NIS 2009 and Norton 360

Description

Proven to be fastest and leanest PC security suite available. Installs in under 1 minute and uses less than 7Mb of memory
Up to the minute updates with Pulse keep your PC protected even against emerging threats by updating every 5 to 15 minutes
New Recovery tool boots and repairs systems even when badly infected
Identity Safe protects your identity from theft, and also enable users to automatically fill in data on online forms
Real-time SONAR (Symantec Online Network for Advanced Response) protects your PC from being compromised by bots
Norton Insight targets at-risk files to perform faster, less frequent scans more intelligently

My Review – Norton Internet Security 2009

One of the complaints that many users have about computer security software is that it is bloated. As vendors have battled it out to capture their piece of the market, they have continued to add more bells and whistles. In theory, those bells and whistles are nice and offer additional protection and convenience. But, the reality is that additional features generally means additional hard drive space, and additional system memory, and additional processing power. In other words, bloated security software is a resource hog that bogs down the PC and affects overall performance.

What happens when security software hogs the resources and bogs down the system is that users simply disable it. PC protection isn’t worth having a slow computer system. So, a PC security suite that impacts system performance with additional bells and whistles often results in no protection at all.

With Norton Internet Security 2009, Symantec learned that lesson. The software is leaner and faster than the competition or its predecessors. Symantec made the suite install faster and use fewer resources, but didn’t really sacrifice any bells and whistles in the process.

Norton Internet Security 2009 (NIS 2009) can be found for around $20 for a single license (or around $50 for a 3-PC license), which is a great and economical price for the scope and caliber of protection it offers. NIS 2009 provides a complete suite of security tool including antivirus, personal firewall, antispyware, antiphishing and more.

My only issue really is with Symantec offering both NIS 2009 and Norton 360. They are both solid products with similar feature sets an an identical target market. It seems to me that Symantec should make the purchasing decision easier by merging the two products together. The result would be an industry-leading, comprehensive computer protection product.