Norton just got slicker

Norton Internet Security 2010 (RRP $99.95, 1 year for 3 PCs)

EVEN BETTER: This year's brew from Norton takes last year's improvements and makes them even better.

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Last year Symantec did something quite remarkable with its flagship internet security product, tightening and tweaking until they had a piece of software that delivered on both performance and user-friendliness.

This year Symantec has done something even more remarkable: it has found even more ways to improve the product.

As with last year's product, installation really was a one-click breeze – if you have opposable thumbs, you're qualified to perform the task. Once installed it went through the initial updates and system scans quickly and cleanly. It was so fast I first thought I'd done something wrong but no, it was simply a matter of efficient software.

The antivirus side of things works pretty much as you would expect, ticking away in the background while keeping out nasties.

I know I keep going on about the internet being a dangerous place but there's a reason for that: a crime is committed on the streets of New York City every three and a half minutes but online a crime happens every quarter of a second. In fact, every 3 seconds an identity is stolen.

Are you scared yet? You should be.

With new nasties in the wild, there's always a delay before fixes appear because that nasty has to be seen to do something nasty before the level of nastiness can be confirmed, and then a fix written and delivered to the masses.

The standard system of classifying files for security via the list system is to whitelist the known good stuff, blacklist the bad guys and have a grey list for, well, the files in the grey area.

That works well for files that have been around long enough for us to know what they do. However, it's not so good for new files. The Insight engine codenamed Quorum uses information from the millions of Nortons users to look at a file and gauge its friendliness. If it's new, hasn't been downloaded by many users and doesn't feature on the trusted signatures list you'll get a wee warning if it appears dodgy.

In earlier years, Nortons was the smelly kid in the security software schoolyard, resource-hungry and not necessarily the best performer, but all that has changed – it's now one of the cool kids.

- © Fairfax NZ News