Norton is one of the prominent player in PC Security scenario. Sometime back we did a review of Norton Internet Security 2011 which is a combination of A Antivirus plus Firewall suite. Today We are going to review another Product called “Norton 360 v5“, which basically is combination of Antivirus plus Firewall plus Parental control and PC Tuneup.

Developers Description

Norton 360 offers proven performance and delivers today’s fast and light all-in-one solution to protect your PC and all your online activities. It protects against viruses, worms, hackers, and botnet. It safeguards against online identity theft, protects important files, and keeps your PC tuned and running at peak performance.

User Interface (GUI) is too simple if you compare with other Antivirus products. It is separated into four tabs of  PC Security, Identity Protection, Backup and PC Tuneup. Each tab provide you a different aspect of this application. Just hover your mouse on any of these tabs and you will see more options related to that tab. The status of your system will be shown using these tabs and you can manage almost all aspects of the application here by clicking the relevant option.

GUI also gives you options for Tasks, settings etc. When you click the Tasks option, a windows showing large number of tasks which can be performed by Norton 360 pops up. These tasks incluse different aspects of Antivirus protection, backup tasks, PC tuneup etc. You need to click on the relevant option to fulfill the desired job.

It also provides you a inbuilt “Startup Manager” which can provide you a detailed information about the applications and process that start with your system automatically often resulting in slow Bootup of your system. You can either disable any specific application(s) or you can make it as ” delay start” making your system boot up fast. To help you decide about each of startup items, it also shows the memory usage associated with each process or application along with community usage data.

It can analyze your system for any problems it may have and then can recommend what action should be taken. THe analysis is done over almost each aspect of your system.

A inbuilt registry cleaner is also there which can help you clean registry of your system making it faster and more responsive.

Regarding the Virus detection and removal capabilities it is quite good. I wont put any test results of my own as it needs a large sample size of viruses and various methods, parameters to check the effectiveness. Please refer my earlier review about Norton Internet security for this along with the data available on av-comparatives.

It also gives you option to disable “Smart Firewall” and “Antivirus Auto-Protect” in the taskbar. Looks like Norton had added this option with this version only as I am unable to remember something similar in any previous Norton Product.

In terms of memory usage, it worked flawless on my old desktop with just having 1 GB RAM on Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2.4 GHz. Norton guys definitely did some fabulous job in terms of memory management in last 1-2 years and hence almost every Norton Product these days is performing great in terms of Memory usage on any system.

Bad:

  1. During Install, it was unable to detect that Avast AntiVirus was installed on my system. I had to uninstall avast manually before restarting the system after Norton 360 was installed.
  2. Internet stopped working when the system restarted first time after the install of Norton 360 was over successfully. Had to restart system one more time before internet started to work.
  3. Just 2 GB of space for backup provided? What you think of 2 GB space these days? Even free services like Sugarsync and Windows Skydrive offers 5 GB and 25 GB space respectively for free.
  4. The GUI is too simple with a Wizard kind of interface and for advance users, it may be a negative point.
  5. Parental control is not integrated right away inside this. You need to go online and sign-up for “Norton Online Family” to enable or use Parental control. Why cant they integrate this feature right inside the application instead of asking people to sign-up somewhere else?
  6. Norton products still works on the belief that it knows what is best. It doesn’t give user a option to intervene if it thinks that a file is malicious. It may be good for Novice users but not for advance users.