Review by Tamara Thorne

Norton has almost always been my favorite security program. I began using it in 1990 when it was Norton Commander - a menu system for DOS - and stuck with it through almost all its incarnations. At some point, maybe seven or eight years ago, it became bloated and I began using free products, which worked fine without slowing the computer to a crawl - but I missed the full scans and features in Norton that I always found so trustworthy.

Six years ago, I switched to a Mac and didn’t go back to Norton. I used nothing for a while since Macs are less likely to be hacked, but that made me very nervous. I installed the free version of Avast and used it until a Mac-savvy friend who was trying to speed my old Mac back up told me I really needed Norton for Mac. (Indeed there was a disk-filling virus in that machine that only Norton was able to catch - Avast was unaware of it.) He told me to run full scans regularly - not just the quickies - and I did that, too.)nnWhen I got a new Mac earlier this year, my Norton was expiring so I went back to Avast for a while. It’s good - it caught a virus, in fact, and does a lot of what Norton does - but it slows the computer considerably. Now I have Norton in my new Mac and things are running very smoothly. The days of bloat are gone. Norton runs fast and clean and even the in-depth scans don’t take too long - or slow the machine perceptibly.

If you need to protect more than one device, get a version that covers multiple devices - it will be a lot cheaper. If, like me, you only protect one computer, this one is perfect.