I had the Trend Micro Security Suite in place since last June, after replacing the Zone Labs Internet Security Suite for not being able to fix a virus it detected. Well, Trend Micro was gone after its firewall did not protect against a Vundo infection which caused a hard drive replacement.

So, with renewal approaching, I set out to look for alternatives. Norton seemed to be more highly rated by professional and user reviewers than McAfee and had the feature set I wanted: firewall and multiple PCs on one license, since I use the same antivirus on my wife's laptop. I had done trials of Bitdefender and Kaspersky last year, disliking each. I saw that Norton's 360 version 3.0, their top of the line product had a nice feature set and I decided to do the 30 day trial.

The feature set included:
Antivirus
Antispyware
Email scanning'
2 GB of secure online storage
Anti-phishing
Rootkit detection
Identity Protection
Web site authentication
Network monitoring
Firewall protection
Automatic Backup and Restore
PC Performance Tuneups
Automatic updates.

So how has it worked? The short answer is good enough to justify buying it. Here are some of my experiences with the product:

Norton is right when they say that impact on PC is modest. I detected negligible impact on my PC with the firewall on and very little additional impact during virus scans and the one full backup I did. With Trend Micro, the virus scans slowed down my PC incredibly, so much so that I would only do the quick scans, instead of full scans and I would run them while asleep. My computer was incredibly slow and annoying during virus scans. Even having the firewall on the rest of the time caused a significant degradation in speed. I had similar issues with Zone Alarm - slow when firewall was on, scans tremendously slowed the PC.

Most of the negative review comments, whether user or pro centered on antispyware not working well. I'd tend to agree because the anti spyware did not detect much. On the other hand, this is not a concern because I am doing weekly scans from the freeware antispyware heavyweight programs Superantispyware, Spybot Search and Destroy and Malware Byte's Anti Malware product.

The utility feature that had a PC diagnostic report that was very helpful in identifying which of the other utilities could be used. IN particular, I found that the startup manager was easy to use and a great addition, because it estimated the performance impact for each startup program.  The Registry Cleanup feature was a nice inclusion but I already have a standalone cleaner that is effective. The Norton feature didn't add a whole lot.

The provided system restore status list was more easily read than the Windows lit because the date and action on each restore point was included.

The routine scans have options for
Update
Antivirus/antispyware
Remove IE temporary files
Remove Windows temp files
Remove IE history
Defrag
Backup

The IE features are not important to me because IE is my third browser of choice behind Firefox and Chrome. The temp file removal feature worked well, as did defrag.

I'm ambivalent about the backup program. It did a full backup well and quickly, in less than a day. However, it did not seem to have an incremental backup feature. Plus, it was a little buggy as I did a full backup and it continued to tell me that I had not backed up. It still recognized the backup for purposes of the restore feature. So, I did a full backup but I won't be doing more full backups as the bundled backup software with my Seagate FreeAgebt 1.5TB External Hard Drive works pretty well and has an incremental backup feature. I do plan to use the free online 2GB storage for as many of my recording master files as I can, although I have not used it yet. I have plenty of redundant hard drive space at home so I will not be purchasing the additional online storage.

The browser features were nice. It asked me if I wanted it to remember the password. Also, while I was looking around for a freeware .PDF editor, it identified a site that had some malware included and recommended against my trying that product.

The automatic updates have worked well.

As for the wireless networking feature, it did recognize and trust our second computer. Trend Micro said that it did, but after the crash I was never able to print documents from the laptop to the printer attached to the desktop. Once Trend Micro was disables, Norton had no problem with network printing. That was a nice feature. I was really annoyed at not being able to print from the laptop.

It has locked up a couple of times when I was trying to run multiple utilities. That causes me some concern, but I've been able to reboot without mishap each time.

On balance, the firewall seems to be effective. The degradation of system performance while scans are running is much less that with Trend Micro or Zone Alarm, for that matter. Most of the utilities are nice incremental features.

I'm not sure that this is the ultimate antivirus product. However, it's a whole lot better than what I had and the pros regard Norton's antivirus features as very good.

I bought a 2-year license and am looking forward to not having to worry about viruses or wait, wait, wait to get any PC commands done while the scans are running.

4 stars

Thanks for reading. God bless!

I have samples from my new CD on my profile page. Please check them out.

Please check out these related reviews:
Trend Micro Security Suite
Zone Labs Internet Security Suite
Seagate FreeAgent Xtreme 1.5 external HD for PC
2 Wire 2791HBG Wireless Router
Canon Pixma IP4300 Photo Printer
US Cellular Cell phone Service
Blackberry 8703 smartphone
Simpletech 250GB USB2 External Hard Drive
Canon Pixma IP4300 Photo Printer
Band In A Box software
Acer 20" Flat Screen Monitor
Lite On SOHW-1673SU DVD±RW Dual Layer Burner
Logitech Marble Mouse Optical Trackball
Canon Pixma IP4200 Photo Printer
D-Link DUB-H7 7-port USB2 hub
Maxtor 5000 Personal Storage 160GB External Hard Drive

Recommended: Yes