Review by JWINK

Having been a long time user of Norton and been through some of the good versions and bad versions from a few years back that was bloated, slow and a memory hog, I stuck with Norton. In recent years and recent versions, Norton has streamlined their protection suite and made it less intrusive and less of a processor/memory hog than it use to be. For me, I was using the 2013 version before upgrading to the new 2014 version and while I consider this one of the best computer protection programs out there (in fact, McAfee bought the older virus scan engine from Norton a few years ago because they couldn’t build anything better themselves), the 2014 version is only a minor upgrade from the 2013 version I was using.

Symantec’s Norton 360 2014 includes a load of protection technologies including antivirus, anti-malware and anti-spam provision, and a good two-way firewall among other things. It also offers a number of extra features aimed at web browsers and mobile devices such as my Android, Norton Mobile Security includes anti-malware, anti-theft, backup and call/SMS blocking.

Norton’s interface is a bit bland this year with yellow boxes on a white background with each labelled Security, Identity, Backup and Tune-up Click on any of the blocks and it moves up to reveal a five item menu and if you want more detail, switch to Task view, which breaks down many of the available protections into individual tasks.

One of the best advantages to Norton is that it updates itself every 5-10 minutes in what they call Pulse and safe Web installs into your web browser to provide browsing protection while you surf the net.

One of my favorite things about Norton 360 is Norton Utilities. One of the best ways to keep your computer from slowing down and being bloated is the Tune-up feature that keep your PC cleaned up from leftover files and broken registry entries along with disk optimization, a diagnostic report and a start-up manager. Start up manager allows you to switch off applications that have set themselves to start when your PC does, placing a load on the system that you may want to avoid. Although I found the startup manager pretty similar to doing it yourself through windows, it does provide a simple easy interface for those more novice users.

Norton 360 has a performance view, where the control panel flips and shows events such as downloads which have taken place in the last three months, and the usage of disk and memory on a variety of timescales. These views I found to be limited in their usefulness but can be beneficial if you’re trying to isolate a change in your system’s performance and correlate with some event.

Symantec provides 2GB of online storage for backup which seems a bit puny compared to other solutions out there. I for one, don’t really utilize this feature as my machine has plenty of backup storage.

The scanning speed and efficiency from the 2013 to 2014 versions seem to be very similar with maybe and I say maybe a slight speed increase in the 2014 version.

One of the differences that I notices was power eraser is now more integrated into the suite. Although I have never had an issue and needed to use it, it seemed like a heavy hitter at cleaning out rootkits, although you do have to reboot your machine to be able to scan and do its thing. The one time I tried it, it did alert me to my java being out of date, which I didn’t realize, so there was some benefit to at least running it.

One of my past complaints is the yearly renewal feature that cripples the software if you don’t renew and that is still a bit of a gripe to me but at least now you can find this suite for a reasonable price than what it use to be.

Installing Norton 360 or in my case upgrading to the new version usually is smooth but I did have a hiccup where I rebooted my machine and though that the program didn’t properly install, but in my case it stalled for a few before completing the installation without any further issues.

Pros:nnExcellent blocking of dangerous websitesnPowerful, intelligent firewallnAccurate spam filteringnGreat antivirus and pulse keeps you constantly updatednGreat PC tuneup featurenMinor impact on system performancennCons:nnA minor upgrade to the 2013 version which is good on its on meritsnLimited usefulness of some of the features, such as performance view.nonly 2 gigs of online storagenYearly renewalnInstalls are not always smoothnnEven with only minor tweaks, Norton is still one of the best choices of protection software out there and if you can find it for less than 30 bucks it is a good value for money. I have used this for years and all my machines have ran smoothly without any issues from the software itself or any of the things that are looking to make your life miserable out on the net.