Norton Anti-Virus 2007

Symantec Norton AntiVirus 2007 is in the upper echelon when it comes to anti-virus software. It sports an attractive and easy-to-use interface and scored an overall virus detection rate of 96 percent in our tests.

It was the slow to respond to virus outbreaks taking an average of 10 to 12 hours to deliver new signatures. Not only that, its proactive protection is only mediocre as it caught about half of the unknown threats in our test using one-month-old signatures.

Norton performed well in our disinfection tests, second only to Kaspersky. It cleaned up 18 out of 22 possible items, missing only one of the two changes to the Hosts network settings file and three less-important registry items.

Symantec has incorporated the new SONAR behavioral analysis technology for proactive protection. The program scans both e-mail and Web traffic, covering the POP3, SMTP, and HTTP protocols and also ties into the MSN, Yahoo, and AOL instant messaging programs (though it protects only MSN by default).

During our design tests on Windows Vista Ultimate, the program turned off the built-in Windows Defender anti-spyware utility without notice. This is not because the utility conflicts, according to the company, but because Symantec feels "Windows Defender offers no value beyond what Norton offers." BitDefender Antivirus 10 was the only other program we have seen that disables Defender when it installs.

Symantec Norton AntiVirus 2007 also triggered multiple UAC (User Account Control) alerts when we changed settings, which could easily annoy power users who might want to customize the application.

Norton AntiVirus costs US$49.95 initially but, strangely, Symantec offers only yearly renewal fee of $59.95, making it one of the more expensive antivirus options in the long term.

We tested the Vista version of Symantec Norton Antivirus 2007 but an XP version of the software is also available.