Norton 360 All-In-One Security Review (Ver 5.0)

March 31 16:06 2011 by Alexei Rivera Print This Article

As someone who’s been troubleshooting PCs for a good portion of my life, I noticed that majority of the time is spent trying to get rid of large utilities and slow software. Over the years, I’ve gotten used to preferring smaller, simpler applications to larger, more elaborate installations. Which is why for the past couple of years, I’ve been using free Anti-Virus software for my Windows PC. However, it looks like one of the most popular security franchise software makers, Symantec Philippines, have come around and released a robust, simple, intuitive, and most-importantly – incredibly fast security package that does a lot more than just keep the viruses at bay. Here is our review for the Norton 360 All-In-One Security software suite.

My last experience with a Norton product was back in 2008, when my laptop came preinstalled with their Norton Internet Security product. While it served all my needs and kept my computer very safe, it did seem like it was large enough, and elaborate enough, for me to want it trimmed just a little. Which is why it came as a pleasant surprise to find out that the Norton 360 bundle had done just that. Straight out of the box, it pretty much just says, “Put it in the disc tray and press Install.” Well it couldn’t have been that simple, right? Well, it was.

Just two straight clicks of a mouse button and off it goes installing. And its done in literally a minute. I thought that it must have just started some sort of preliminary install, but I was wrong. The installation was complete and Norton 360 was already running. It couldn’t be simpler. But how could it be so quick? I have no idea. However, I did check the install size of the application and it was sitting at a very unencumbering 108mb. How they could fit such a comprehensive security suite into 100mb is beyond me, but they managed to anyway.

I started up the main window and was expecting some elaborate splash image with a loading screen to greet me, but I was wrong again. Out comes a small, simplified interface with all security features neatly summarized into four simple tabs on the main screen: PC Security, Identity Protection, Backup, and PC Tuneup. The tabs themselves give you a great deal of information about how secure your computer is. Hovering your mouse over any of these tabs will give you the most common actions you can do like scan, update, backup, defrag (Disk Optimization), and various other settings and actions. Below that is a horizontal area that has a map of recent security threats shown in real-time. (This is an especially nice touch – since it reminds you of the dangers of not having decent defense against potential malware and hackers.) You can also change this to display your parental security settings or make it have search bars to safely search the internet or check URL’s for malware. On the top is a toolbar that has a window for all the possible Tasks, Advanced Settings, a very useful resource graph, and Feedback, Account, & Full-Time Support buttons.

For the most part Norton 360 remains in the background silently maintaining your system secure. It is generally very unobtrusive to the way you use your computer and we barely notice any increased slowdown normally attributed to bloated Anti-Virus software running in the background.

When Norton makes itself known though, it does only when it has to. At some point while we were browsing the internet, it threw up a performance warning saying that Firefox was using 98% of my CPU resources. Well, that was worrying. Thank you Norton 360 for letting me know. Had I continued on using Firefox, it might have crashed my system and lost my data.

Scanning for viruses and malware is relatively simple as well. The software allows for Full scans, Quick scans, and Custom scans for viruses, questionable applications, and even your Facebook wall. Scanning also doesn’t use too much CPU resources so you’ll most likely not need to pause it should you need to use the computer at the same time.

Norton 360 also features a Backup system that isn’t present in any competing brands. You are given 2Gb of storage on their servers free to backup any important files you need. You can set up scheduled backups to automatically keep your data safe and Norton 360 will do it for you.

For advanced users, there’s considerable amounts of possible tweaks and settings you can customize to your needs in the Settings menu. However, as regular users, we found the settings more than adequate enough for us and didn’t really change too many settings ourselves.

Overall, we really like Symantec’s new Norton 360 All-In-One Security (Ver 5.0) software suite. Its really easy to set-up, doesn’t put a major strain on system resources, and is very intuitive about how to keep your computer secure and problem-free. The interface is clean and will give you the status of your PC security in just one quick glance, as well as the popups that remind you of certain things about your system that may need attention. Finally, it doesn’t completely force its way into every single thing you do on your computer and maintains a relatively low profile. Which is exactly the way we want our security systems to be – simple, fast, and powerful.