Hands-on Review: Norton 360

Since we spend so much time looking at new products for the first time, I figured it might be a productive change for me to talk about Norton 360, a computer security product I've been using for the last two months. Norton 360 combines antivirus, back-up, PC tune-up, and other PC maintenance functions with some new functionality to keep us safe from fraud and phishing sites on the web. It's a solution that I'd recommend to anyone who spends a lot of time surfing the web but would prefer not to do a lot of fussing around with their computer security software.

I switched to Norton 360 because—despite the fact that I had antivirus software installed—I was becoming skittish about the amount of time I spent browsing the web. I figured I was just as likely to suffer from downloading some fraudulent piece of software or visiting a fake web site as encountering a virus. In essence, with virus software, I was protecting myself from catching cold, but not from getting mugged!

Norton 360 takes the form of an annual subscription that you'll need to update each year. Once it's installed, you see four simple buttons (see photo) partitioning your tasks into protecting your PC, protecting your financial transactions, backup, and keeping your PC well tuned. Beneath each button are a few simple choices explained in plain English.

In addition to traditional antivirus protection, the program detects and blocks seven million phishing sites and identifies attacks on email, IMs, and documents in real time as they happen. It'll also automatically clean up your disk from things like temporary files. It evens includes a back-up tool allowing you to choose to back up all or some of your files to a chosen location. (They provide 2 MB of free online storage that I've been using to keep a quick daily copy of my Outlook mail file—the most important file in my life.)

The part that appeals to me? Without adjusting a single setting, you're in pretty good shape. With the exception of backup, where you have to tell the program where you want to backup to and which files to include, almost everything else is selected automatically. Every once in awhile I visit the statistics page (see photo) just to assure myself the software is really at work.

According to Enrique Salem, group president at Symantec, the world of bad guys on the web has changed, and computer protection software had to change with it. Today, he says, 27 million people in the U.S. have already become the victims of Internet identity theft. Fraud is responsible for a loss of $56 billion annually.

Is it perfect software? No. When I first load my email program each morning there is a noticeable delay while Norton 360 scans the incoming messages. (Coffee time!) But once that's done, I hardly notice any slowdown or drag on system resources.

The weakest part of the suite of tools is the backup—you don't have as much fine control with Norton 360 as other back-up programs, but you also don't need to be an Einstein to restore your files in the event of a crash. The program uses refreshingly straightforward English, stripped of jargon-ese. For example, it'll ask you to back up your photos not your AVI, JPG, and EPS files. Nice.

Those who are a bit more advanced may find Norton 360 comes up shorter still. It doesn't support Firefox or Opera browsers and doesn't include wireless security tools. And, in perhaps the most serious omission, it doesn't cache your passwords for web sites, a feature that would help casual users tremendously.

That said, Symantec's new program is a breath of fresh air. It's the simplest security program I've ever used.