Norton Antivirus (and its various other incarnations) gets short shrift in hardcore techie circles, namely due to its reputation for being bloated and consuming tons of memory, running slow scans, and causing massive system instability. And those complaints were all justified: Even Symantec won't argue with you on them.

Well I'm here to tell you that Norton has mended its ways, and the 2009 edition of Norton's security tools is revamped, cleaned up, streamlined, and barely recognizable vs. the Nortons of yore.

I've been running Norton Internet Security 2009 for several months now (since its early betas) and am wholly pleased with the dramatic turnaround. Easy to use and positively sipping in its use of system resources, you'll barely notice Norton is installed. No crashes, either.

And that's the point: Symantec's new approach here is not to hijack your system with alerts and toolbars (remember those awful, enormous logos taking up space in the taskbar in older Norton versions?), but rather to sit back and do its work quietly. By default, Norton updates itself in the background constantly -- literally hundreds of times each day -- and runs full system scans when the computer is idle.

Just installing the old Norton used to take 20 minutes or more. The new Norton goes on your PC in less than a minute. Scans are faster too: Norton uses a trust system to mark files it's already scanned in the past and doesn't scan them again if they haven't changed. The result: Super-fast scans whether you're watching them or not. And so far: I'm virus free since I installed the software.

I do have two complaints: First is Norton's insistence on trying to get you to register your software every time you load it (just the full app; if you leave Norton running in the background you get no pop-ups). You can skip these nags, but it's kind of a pain, and there's no "never remind me again" option. Second is the lack of detail in log reports. I know Norton has been streamlined for beginner use, but this has come at the expense of some information that pros would probably like to see. Many entries are simply missing details about what attacks have been discovered. One recent entry in the log just notes "Trojan Horse detected by Virus scanner" but offers no other information on what specific Trojan Horse it was. I usually like to look up these viruses online to find out more about them -- including whether it was an email, IM, or web-based attack -- but Norton is mum on the details. Some entries offer the name of the malware, but some don't, and there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to it.

But those are minor quibbles. $60 (currently on sale) gets you protection for three PCs, which is a fair price for such a capable tool. But hey, don't take my word for it: Norton came out on top in the recent anti-virus roundup at Maximum PC -- notorious for its hard-core testing -- scoring a 9 out of 10 rating and noting its memory usage is half that of Kaspersky and Avast! If you've been gunshy for Norton in years past, give it a spin next time you need to upgrade your antivirus. You'll be surprised, I assure you.