I had been one of those guys who hate Norton products for the way they behave on system and the huge memory consumption associated with them. But Every time they release a new version even at beta stage, I download it and give it a try to see if its improved or not and if improved, then to what extent.

DOWNLOAD, INSTALLATION AND ACTIVATION

SO today I will be talking about Norton Internet security 2011 beta. I had to download free Norton internet security installer from Symantec beta website. It was a web installer which means, a small installer which uses your net connection to download the real installer. I hate these web installer as you cannot install the application if you don’t have a working internet connection. Anyway, The installer downloaded the files which were more than 80 MB. The installation was much faster than I expected. Frankly speaking I never have seen a security suite , Internet security or antivirus getting installed so quickly.

Installation didn’t even asked for a reboot and started working straight away. That’s a great as we all hate reboots in windows. Now I needed to activate it within 7 days. I used the key received in email from Symantec to activate it. Here I noticed a welcome change. The key was valid for 120 days a big leap from earlier beta versions which gave just 15 days.

LIVE UPDATE

After the installation, I just ran the Live update module to check for any updates available. I was just surprised at the size of update file which was available. It was almost the size of the setup file, 81.33 MB to be precise. ITs too big update for a newly installed product with the latest installer and Norton guys must do something about it as for many of us, it’s too difficult to update with such big update due to poor internet connections.

MEMORY USAGE

Now i went to task manager to see the effect of Norton internet security 2011 on Memory usage of the system. Frankly speaking I didn’t believe the value shown in Task manager. The memory consumption was merely ~5 MB. I checked it again and it stayed at same figure. Kudos to Norton guys for achieving this.

MEMORY USAGE WHILE SCAN

After this I jumped to another memory hogging feature. I ran a full system scan on the system and then went to task manager to see the memory consumption. Once again, I was surprised to see the result. The memory consumption was just ~43 MB. This value is still too low compared to earlier versions better than even most of the other best AV suites. I didn’t note the time taken for a full 80 GB system scan but it didn’t took more than 30 minutes.

I was not able to find the direct link  to download free Norton Internet security offline installer.You can still download free Norton Internet security 2011 beta web installer with a valid 120 days key here.

PS: – I will talk about the rest of Features either in my next post or Will add that here only.