Norton 360 v5.0, 1 User, 3 PCs 1 Year Subscription (PC)

I'm a fan of Norton 360, having used it for several years without any problems. Installation has always been straight forward providing I used a disc rather than download it from their website, which is more expensive than Amazon anyway, and it provides good all round protection. Howewever, having just installed version 5 because it was cheaper than version 4 when I bought it I am now regretting my decision. I'm not sure why the scanning processess were split but maybe in time I'll find out, and I don't see the point of the Activity Map, Online Family and Safe Web buttons but maybe others do. I'm also having one or two problems - a couple of the scans have frozen and the Gadget is incomplete on my new Windows 7 laptop. Also my partner's laptop running Vista wouldn't shut down after installation. Norton 360 is good but if like me you don't use Facebook (because as far as I can see that is the only useful addition to version 5) and were happy with 360v4 stick with it. I wish I had and may well end up doing so yet.

Having tried Norton Internet Security 2010, I did an upgrade to see if Norton 360 Version 5.0 All-In-One Security is massive improvement. Thankfully, it is.

Norton 360 5.0 provides the user with the quick and easy installation, the previous version is automatically removed.

I have installed Norton 360 5.0 on two desktop PCs and a laptop running Windows 7. I have not observed any system slowdowns - it appears to be light on RAM and CPU cycles.

I'm glad there are less annoying alerts and notification windows*. This was a much needed improvement.

I want to deduct half a star for value/price. This license covers 3 PCs. If you get Vipre Antivirus Premium - Unlimited Home Site License - 1 Year - Full Version you can cover all the PCs in your home; good to share the cost with housemates.

*Whilst Norton is very good, I do prefer Trend Titanium as that doesn't even nag you to say that it needs to update. (It just does it, in the background, automatically)

Norton antivirus software is not something I would have chosen had it not been for a free copy I was given with the Amazon Vine test scheme. To explain that I must add some of my history. I have been a professional programmer for many decades, and have used Norton products since IBM first sold their 8086 powered PC's. In that time Norton went from the best to the slowest most lumbering beasts available, their products almost became unusable as they became software bloated beyond belief.

I use 5 PC's at home, 2 laptops, 2 Desktops, and a netbook, and yes they are all mine. Covering all those PC's with antivirus software does allow the ability to test and explore the capabilites of many products, and although I now don't write virus code to test products (something I did legally as part of my progamming remit), I do take note of usability and speed. I had been using Norton products up untill 5 or so years ago when I changed to such AV products as the many free ones, finally ending up with Kaspersky and the Microsoft Essentials packages. Microsoft Essentials is excellent as a free product, and the Kaspersky 'Pure' suite provides fast and reliable cover with a good front end.

To try Norton 360 version 5.0 I decided to use two machines currently running Microsoft Essentials, those machines being an Advent 4213 net book using Windows XP, and a home built desktop using an AMD Athlon IIx4 with 4gb ram and the latest version of Windows 7.

Before starting I must stress it is important to read the installation instructions that come with Norton 630, this does not take long as there is only a page or so involved, the insructions are brief and to the point, but important.

Starting with the Netbook, this had no CD drive, so I had to use the download option to get the installation files, the speed of this will obviously depend on your internet connection speed. In my case this was not fast due to my connection speed being on a slow 1g connection, but it was painless and one of the easiest downloads of such a product I have encountered in a long time. The installation detected the presence of Microsoft essentials, and prompted for it's removal with all the relevant uninstall boxes appearing as needed. After a reboot, which was fast by the way, I tested Norton by doing a quick scan of the hard disks, i.e. 150GB of various files of all sorts from music, video, text, programs, and photos, the quick scan took 2.5 minutes, with the scan checking 5,417 files. 71 items gave security alerts, these turned out to be tracking cookies I had allowed other AV products to let through. But 0 files actually needed attention. The scan also did a sort of PC tune, removing deleted files from the recycle bin, and other files the scan had decided I did not need any longer. I was slightly upset at this as it did not ask me if I wanted to delete the files, but as I had not checked any of the settings for the scan before hand I should have expected that to be the default behavior.

Previous versions of some Anti-Virus software had caused problems for me in the past with not allowing the use of a NAS drive. Norton had transparently recognised the existance of my NAS drive and set itself up automatically allowing the viewing of everything as it should be.

Norton includes a backup solution, this includes a 'free' 2GB cloud type backup area that for extra money you can expand from the 2GB, I did not test this, but I did test running a backup to the NAS, this worked as expected. Interestingly the backup includes an 'automatic' setting to backup files as they change when the system becomes idle.

To install on the AMD PC, I used the CD. Starting the install software according to the instructions gave a clean timer screen which changed display as appropriate. The CD installation fast and in no way laborious. The whole process only taking a few minutes. There was not the extended download of latest updates required by some installation processes, although AV products are never up-to-date as they come out of the box because of the speed of change and development of viruses and other nasties.

Always, regardless of the product you use, make sure your AV is kept up-to-date, new viruses etc., apear by the minute!

The total install time from the CD only took 2 minutes. A recomendation in itself, however, the CD install did not tell me that there would be a conflict with the copy of Microsoft Essentials installed. This is bad. There should only be one AV product installed on a PC at a time, AV products can fight amonst themselves allowing viruses to sneak in while the fight is going on. I uninstalled Microsoft Essentials manually, and rebooted the PC. The reboot was fast, with none of the delay other and indeed some older versions of Norton AV products have caused. You would hardly know there was an AV product running.

A Quick scan took 57 seconds to cover the files on a 500GB disk, I apologise here as I did not make a note of the number, but the 2 partition drive was approximately one third full.

The actual front end for the product gives a clean unclutted screen, this does not mean there is no functionality, there is masses all accessed via simple click on text options, I do not intend to list it all here, I am not allowed that much space for a review. But the functionally includes amongst the various AV options, backup and system health, both things that normally you have to buy seperatly if you are not happy with the standard offerings of Microsoft.

Overal I was very impressed with this offering from Norton and would wholeheartedly reccomend it, I cannot say how good it is at picking up actual viruses, but it's interface has changed from the old 3 legged dog I remember to that of a young greyhound.