| Product: |
Symantec Norton 360 |
| Date: |
16/02/08 (797 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: good variety of features, quick and easy updates
Disadvantages: expensive
These days, it is a necessity to have Anti-Virus software installed on your PC... all because of hackers who get some sort of kick out of accessing people's personal data. An annoyance really, due to the cost, and also the sacrifice of losing processing speed, desperately needed when running those big apps.
My form of protection is Norton 360, which I managed to get bundled with my new PC, so all in all not a bad deal. On installing the software, I was quite surprised to find that it wasn't just am Anti-Virus, but the whole deal... antivirus, Antispyware, Email scanning, automatic backup and restore, 2gb secured online storage, PC performance tune-ups... quite a long list of pretty cool stuff.
Anyway, installing Norton is quite a 'doddle' (very easy) requiring very little knowledge from even the worst computer users. You start by entering your product key onto the screen (which comes on a small leaflet sized sheet); you can also create an account with Norton on which this key will be stored, just in case you ever lose it. The set up then leads onto asking you to backup your system, where you can use anything such as a DVD, external HDD... any type of storage media. I chose to skip backing up by system however, as I do it all myself manually. It finally leads onto finish installing, before informing you it needs to update via the internet; updates come very easily and quickly, and free with your subscription.
After completing this update, you are sometimes asked to restart your computer... on restart your gifted with a big yellow icon on your desktop (which I immediately deleted). Clicking on the icon brings up the main window, which has the following options:
PC Security - where you can alter your firewall settings, LiveUpdate settings, and also the Virus and Spyware scans. Other settings in this window include Intrusion Prevention settings and browser Vulnerability settings.
Transaction Security - allows the Phishing Protection settings to be changed
Backup and Restore - allows files to be backed up and restored from various different mediums I described earlier. You can also use the free 2GB online storage, although I found this to be rather useless... it needs at least another one "0" on the end to be of any actual use (i.e. 20gb).
PC Tune-up - allows various clean-up functions to be run, such as Internet History Clean-ups, Internet Temporary files clean-up, windows temporary files, and disk Optimization.
I found that I never actually needed to use any of these functions though, as it conveniently runs them itself automatically on a weekly/daily bases. The status of Norton 360 can be viewed from the taskbar icon in the bottom corner, which is green when my system is running fine, and red obviously when it isn't; when it shows red, its generally because the computer needs restarting.
That brings me to one big problem with Norton 360 (and probably most Norton products)... the amount of times it requires me to restart. Owning a laptop makes this a very big annoyance, as I don't regularly turn it off (I use the hibernate feature), although this can't be helped. The amount of times you do have to restart though does reduce over time.
Another problem I have had with Norton 360 is when it has just disappeared off my system. The icon doesn't show in the taskbar, and when I try and run it from the start-menu, nothing happens. I have still not found any solution to this problem, and found that the only way to overcome it is to reinstall. Since owning it (which has been around 6/7 months), I have had to perform a reinstall twice... something which isn't particularly easy when a separate Norton removal tool is required. You need to download this tool, remove Norton 360, restart, install Norton 360, and then restart again... all in all a lengthy process especially for less the people not very computer literate. I don't know whether this was a general problem or not... it may be just me, since I am running Vista.
Below I have made a list of average prices for the product from various different retailers: (prices may have changed)
£49.98 -> Amazon
£54.99 -> Play.com
£52.88 -> PC world
£47.99 -> directly from Norton
Overall, Norton 360 is a great product (when it works), and is worth buying as long as you have the money, and know at least a little about computers.
Thanks for reading.
Summary: Probably one of the best Anti-Virus softwares out their!
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