Norton AntiVirus is antivirus software from Symantec. Norton has a long history of protecting users from malware and a large base of satisfied customers.

Performance
After you review the list of features in an antivirus software product, the essential questions remain: How well does it protect? How good is it at repair? Is it highly usable or not? Has anyone objectively tested it? Norton AntiVirus received the West Coast Labs Checkmark for antivirus desktop and anti-Trojan tests. It also achieved the Advanced Award from AV Comparatives in August 2011.

It is significant that Norton is AV-Test Certified. AV-Test is a respected independent laboratory in Germany that tests antivirus software and researches the best products and procedures to detect malware. The test network in the lab is quite elaborate with a couple of dozen servers and almost 300 workstations. The lab has collected 100 million pieces of clean test data and 50 million pieces of malicious test data during the past 15 years. Every day, AV-Test adds 50,000 new pieces of malware to its collection of malicious test data. AV-Test results place Norton AntiVirus software in the top 20th percentile for usability and protection on Windows XP.

Features
In addition to protecting your PC against spyware and viruses, Norton AntiVirus software scans instant messages and email to check for infected attachments, suspicious links and viruses. It also scans your Facebook newsfeed to discover links to unsafe sites or dangerous downloads. If you are about to download a dangerous application, Norton will warn you. In addition to checking files against a database of known threats, this product applies behavioral analysis to uncover any suspicious file behavior that could reveal malware too new to be in the database of known threats. The Symantec technology that analyzes file behavior is called SONAR (Symantec Online Network for Advanced Response). Its main job is to detect brand new threats, so-called zero-day threats. SONAR examines what any particular process is doing on your computer, and it also looks at communications to and from your computer to detect any patterns or series of associations that fit the malware profile.

The software is quick to install and it runs in the background and doesn’t consume memory or hard disk space. The control center is organized with tabs. You can choose a simple view if you want to delegate protection decisions, or a detailed view if you like to twiddle with controls. Norton detects when you connect to the internet over a 3G network and it stops making any updates that are not essential so that you don’t have to pay your carrier for excess data.

Help & Support
Customer support is available online or by live chat, telephone and email 24/7.

Management of your Norton products is now cloud based, so you can install, transfer, update or renew Norton product subscriptions from anywhere on the internet.