TAG | Is Norton Internet Security 2009 just lipstick on a pig? |
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| by Davey Winder | |
| Wednesday, 17 September 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 3 As Alex Zaharov-Reutt has already reported following his attendance
at a Norton 2009 reviewers workshop, Symantec has not held back on the
tweaks, the re-writes, nor the claims with regard to speed, size and
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Compared to 33 other security software solutions Norton Internet Security 2009 ended up at the top of the list with 98 percent of malware detected and no false positives. However, that's just the potatoes, for the real meat of this story we need to look at the PassMark benchmarks. Based upon tests performed using a Windows Vista system with Intel Core 2 Duo 6300 and 1GB RAM, PassMark has Norton 2009 installing in just 52 seconds. That's one click and less than a minutes from media in to protection running and done. That's also faster than the competition, so Norton 2009 scores one point there. Then there is the claim about it being a system resource friendly product, something that really did make me laugh when I first heard the marketing folk saying it, and with a straight face as well. Maybe less resource intensive than previous versions, but that would not exactly be hard. Yet according to PassMark it not only has a smaller memory footprint, but at less than 7MB is smaller than the competition. Symantec is making quite a lot of this, right down to having a CPU meter showing actual usage slap bang there on the main Norton 2009 user interface. It must be confident if it is making this kind of public display of the fact. Mind you, during the launch it was revealed that users can even get a full screen CPU usage display which lets you dig down into that usage, display graphs and so on. Forgive for asking the obvious: but would this not use more CPU cycles in so doing? The third benchmark where Norton 2009 comes out top is in scanning speed, with a PassMark score of just 33 seconds which again was faster than all the rest. Scanning speed has been greatly reduced courtesy of what Symantec calls 'Norton Insight.' This works on the principle that you are not the only person to have Firefox, for example, installed and running. What effect does Norton Insight have on scanning speeds, and what else has Symantec introduced to Norton 2009? More on page 3... CONTINUES |
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