2006 Antivirus Review

Norton Antivirus 2006

Installation:

The installation of Norton Antivirus 2006 forces the installation of Windows Installer 3.1 which requires another reboot. There are not many options to configure and it is an easy and straight forward install. The installation asks you to register your product by Internet or phone, but is not required to complete the installation. Norton tells you to 'Run Live Update' and 'Scan Now' immediately after the installation which scores points with us. I think it's very helpful when a security product recommends the next steps, as updating the virus pattern files are very often forgotten about. After the updates it requires another reboot to complete the install.

Configuration:

Surprisingly the 'Automatic Live Update' was set to 'Off' by default on our installation, although the program recommends it be set to 'On'. We recommend you check your own installation and verify this is set to 'On'. Norton includes a 'Comprehensive Internet Worm Signature List' that it uses to identify harmful Internet worm viruses. If need to, you can choose to make exceptions to the list. We found the default configuration is set to most secure. We believe it's better to open doors on a need be basis rather than leave them open. Norton's product feels the same way. If you've ever had your Internet home page hijacked before, you'll appreciate Norton's 'Home Page Protection' that prevents homepage hijacking and is turned on by default. This has become a popular method of today's viruses, and alleviated by Norton's Antivirus 2006. There is a lot of annoying program messages that popup from the Norton icon in the toolbar in an attempt to keep you informed. You can move this feature from the toolbar to the taskbar, but this caused us to have two Norton icons in taskbar.

Resources:

Norton Antivirus 2006 installs a lot of processes that, unfortunately, take a lot of system resources. The installation takes about 45mb on the hard drive space, but leaves the system memory with holes of an artillery attack. If you're like me and don't like programs running in the background, you're not going to like this. The system scan process used all 100% CPU utilization during scan, with nothing to complete other work on. The following are the system processes the program installs and runs:

CCAPP.EXE 14.7mb
CCSETMGR.EXE 4.9mb
CCEVTMGR.EXE 3.1mb
SNDSRVC.EXE 2.1mb
SPBBCSVC.EXE 2mb
NSCSRVCE.EXE 1.2mb
NAVAPSVC.EXE 1.0mb
ALUSCHEDULER.EXE 1.0mb
NPFMNTOR.EXE .68mb
SYMLCSVC.EXE .18mb

Ability:

Stopped all viruses quickly in real-time with easy to read alerts.

	Real-Time	Full Scan
AOL Trojan	Yes	NA
Backdoor Ambush	Yes	NA
DOS-Misoska	Yes	NA
Email-LoveLetter	Yes	NA
Exploit-GetAdmin	Yes	NA
IM Worm-Jitux	Yes	NA
MSOfficeVirus-Darkstar	Yes	NA
Nuke-Genocide	Yes	NA
Trojan-FakeGina	Yes	NA
Worm-Doomjuice	Yes	NA

(Real-Time: This is the preferred detection method. The virus was stopped as it entered the computer, before it planted itself onto any media such as the hard drive. Full Scan: The virus planted itself onto the media of the computer such as a folder on the hard drive and was found during a scheduled Full Scan. NA means the Full Scan was not needed.)

Uninstalling:

Clean uninstall, just leaving an empty Symantec folder after a system reboot.

Support:

Norton offers a free On-line FAQ, but if you continue it asks you to install an online plug-in. I don't like the on-line plug-in, and would prefer a form. 'Live Chat' is free, but the wait time was estimated at 15 minutes. Email support is free too, but you can expect to get an answer in about 72 hours! Phone support will cost you $29.95 per incident. Unfortunately the support is poor for Norton Antivirus 2006.

Price & Options:

Norton Antivirus 2006 costs $39.99 to download, and an extra $9.95 for CD media. This is for a 12 month subscription, and if you want you can upgrade to two years for $59.99.

Other Notes:

Norton Antivirus 2006 does a great job of having inclusive vulnerabilities all in one product. Hijacks, Adaware, Spyware, Trackware and others are all in this one Antivirus product.