Davey Winder
Tuesday, 16 September 2008 23:58
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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
performance.
But how do those claims actually stack up? Well
if you listen to independent and well respected security review
authorities such as
AV-Test Labs then the answer
would seem to be very well indeed.
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...
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