Norton AntiVirus 2005 Software Review

Norton AntiVirus 2005 is the next release from the Symantec enterprise. Over the last few years Norton AntiVirus has become the definitive tool for fighting the influx in viruses and trojans that has plagued the internet during its growth. Nowadays, Norton faces lots of competition from companies such as McAfee and even Microsoft. So how does Norton fare? Can it offer the average home user everything they need to protect themselves? Is the real time protection against internet worms sufficient? Hopefully this review will answer all of these questions for you.

Unfortunately whilst the Norton installation process may take up to 5minutes on your average machine, the process is extremely simple. You have guides on-screen leading you through your activation process, which makes the whole setup much smoother. Once installation is complete, you're asked to reboot and then everything is setup and ready to go.

Norton AntiVirus 2005 comes with four basic components. The Auto-Protect component monitors your system and provides continuous protection from viruses and other malicious threats. The Internet Worm Protection component blocks internet worm attacks at the point of entry. The Email Scanning component monitors all incoming emails to your default mail client and detects any viruses or other malicious threats that may be sent through as attachments for example. The Full System Scan component scans your whole system for any potential viruses or malicious threats. Below we shall go into detail on how the four components work and how they can benefit you:

The Auto-Protect feature or Norton AntiVirus 2005 acts as a constant ongoing process to try and detect any viruses or malicious threats as they enter your system. As soon as virus is detected Norton alerts you and tried to quarantine and delete the virus. Whilst this feature is a great defence against most viruses and trojans, we did notice that Norton could not quarantine and delete a virus known as: Trojan.ByteVerify.

Internet Worm Protection

During 2004 two notable internet worms called Sasser and Blaster caused damage to thousands of computers and business networks around the world. As a result Norton has introduced this feature as of 2005. So what can this feature do to help you? It acts as almost a partial firewall to block the requests of the internet worms point of entry to your computer. Symantec (Norton's parent company) have a large team dedicated to investigating all worms and as soon as one is detected they can issue a definitions update to protect you before the worm has a chance to hit your system.

Prior to spyware and adware, the most common way of infecting a users system with a virus was through email communications. During the web's early days in the late 90s email was the sole way of communicating and viruses could be sent via email and furthermore infecting a users address book of the email client and forwarding the virus to all their contacts. Norton AntiVirus 2005 prevents you against this by scanning all incoming emails and their attachments for viruses. Think of it again as a first line of defence.

Undoubtedly Norton's most powerful feature and also the most essential. The Full System Scan component of Norton AntiVirus 2005 scans all files on your system, all processes and registry entries for known viruses or other malicious threats. You can schedule the full system scan to run at specific intervals or times to automate the process. The full system scan will find almost all traces of viruses if you have any on your system, however don't think of doing anything that will require a lot of processing whilst the system scan is in progress. It takes almost all of your system resources, meaning you just have to leave it going. On a computer with an AMD Athlon 2400+ XP processor and 512mb RAM, it took approximately 3hour to perform a full system scan on its full 60gb hard-drive. Whilst the scan is running Norton will attempt to fix any viruses it finds and if it cannot fix them you are given the opportunity to quarantine the files. The whole user interface is intuitive and incredibly easy to use, making it perfect for your average home-user to utilise.

LiveUpdate Virus Definitions

The Symantec team is committed to issuing updates to its virus definitions as soon as a fix to a threat arises. However, compared to a few of the other major anti-virus companies Symantec fairs slightly slower in issuing the fixes. The time-issue is only a slightly minor one and providing automatic definition updates is turned on (as it is by default), then the virus definitions will prevent you from almost all threats before it will attack.

Instant Messenger Protection

Norton AntiVirus 2005 comes equipped with a plugin to scan incoming files on the major instant messenger protocols: MSN, AIM and Yahoo. As instant messengers surpass emails as the most popular form of communication Norton has rightly integrated its virus protection into them.

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Norton AntiVirus 2005 Software Review

Review for: Norton AntiVirus 2005

Editors Rating: 7.5/10

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