Norton 360 4.0

Full Review

The latest version of Symantec’s All-in-One security suite – Norton 360 4.0 packs in almost everything you will ever need to protect your PC from all kinds of attacks, and comes with an impressive collection of system tune-up tools. It even provides 2GB of online storage capacity to safely backup your data.

The intuitive and clean interface makes it a no-brainer for quickly seeing the current system’s status and provides a very convenient way to access all the features without the need to dig around. It displays the suite’s four main components – PC Security, Identity Protection, Backup, and PC Tuneup – right up front and by just hovering on any of the components you can view and change options for each component. Clicking on the third icon on the lower right corner flips the interface and displays a graphical summary of the system’s status and what resources are being utilized currently.

Norton 360 4.0 includes all the security features of Norton Internet Security 2010 including the reputation-based monitoring system. It comes with all the essential protection tools – Antivirus, antispyware, anti-phishing, firewall, anti-spam, rootkit and other malware protection. Apart from that, it also comes with Download Insight which checks the files being downloaded and blocking the one which looks suspicious and Safe Web feature which provides comprehensive online protection including a site Safety option which provides security info in search results pages. It even has an option to provide you comprehensive info on all the files residing on your PC.

In AV-Test.org test, it has detection and blocking rate of 98%and 92% respectively and no false-positive whatsoever, which is quite impressive.

As for the system optimizing tools, it has a startup manager, registry cleaner, and disk optimizer. After tinkering around with all the provided tune-up tools, we felt that it is mainly aimed at users who want a quick way to speed up the system without fiddling around with various settings. Most of these were basic tools at the best without many options for fine-tuning it further. Take for instance, the startup manager isn’t much different from Windows’ own apart from a startup delayer (but you can’t specify the delay time); and also the disk optimizer just perform defragmentation tasks. But since it comes bundled with a security suite, it is more than enough for someone who wants to quickly optimize their system without the need to look around much.

We didn’t find any lag in system performance while running Norton 360. And we found that some tasks did actually run faster after we did the disk tune-up and registry cleaning. It will be noteworthy to mention that it features an intelligent optimizing and scanning functionality that kicks in whenever your PC is idle thus saving you from system slowdown hassles and provides better resources management. Another very good feature is the Norton Insight tool that sifts out the trusted files so that it is not checked again while doing a scan, thus saving precious system resources.

Symantec has also included online storage for backing up all the important data in the cloud. Norton 360 comes with 2GB by default with option to purchase more storage space as the need arises.

 

Bottom Line

So, in conclusion we think that this is a very good addition to your PC if you are looking for a comprehensive security suite with the added bonus of online backup and system tune-up tools.