Norton AntiVirus 2005 review

Jeff Bertolucci CNET

Published: 06 Oct 2004

If Norton AntiVirus (NAV) 2005 is long on dependability, it's short on sizzle, adding only a few modest enhancements to last year's version. NAV's strengths remain its well-designed interface and impressive virus-blocking performance history. The new QuickScan tool, which automatically searches for viruses following updates, is a welcome addition; however, we're less thrilled with the much-touted worm blocker because it doesn't match the level of protection found in fully-fledged firewalls offered in competing antivirus packages. Current NAV users should upgrade to 2005, however, as the upgrade costs only marginally more than Symantec's annual subscription-renewal fee. But new users should shop around for an antivirus program that also includes a firewall, such as last year's Editors' Choice, Trend Micro's PC-cillin Internet Security 11, or the newly released ZoneAlarm with Antivirus.

Setup & interface

Norton AntiVirus 2005 now takes less time to setup and configure than before. In version 2004, a preinstall antivirus scan examined every file on your PC -- time-consuming overkill. This year NAV saves time with its new QuickScan engine, checking only the usual-suspect files and folders -- those with Startup entries or with System-Start INI or batch entries -- and skipping less likely files and folders, such as music and image folders.

After the quick presetup scan, NAV installs itself, automatically downloads the latest virus definitions and program files, and runs a mandatory, comprehensive post-setup scan. Our initial setup took just less than 45 minutes; plan to step away from the PC and brew some tea in that time, though, as NAV is a major resource hog during its system scan, essentially rendering your PC useless for other tasks. For instance, in our informal tests, Microsoft Word took 35 seconds to load during a system scan. With no scan running, it took just 6 seconds on our 2GHz Celeron system with 512MB of RAM. See below for more on system performance.

NAV's clean, well-organised interface remains one of the best in the antivirus market, and we're pleased to see it's mostly unchanged. One noteworthy upgrade is the Protection Alert screen, which allows you to specify a period of inactivity when disabling NAV's real-time virus scanner -- a necessary evil when installing some programs. Simply right-click the NAV icon in the Windows Taskbar, click Disable Auto-Protect and select a period of shutdown time -- 15 minutes, 1 hour, 5 hours or until the system restarts. This is important because many users forget to turn the scanner back on.

Features

Like its competitors, Norton AntiVirus 2005 scans and cleans instant-messenger attachments, as well as inbound and outbound email. However, all of NAV's best features are carryovers from 2004. This year's version adds Norton Internet Worm Protection, a lightweight firewall feature that blocks unsolicited inbound traffic, including nasty troublemakers such as the Blaster and Sasser worms. Unlike a full-on firewall, however, Worm Protection won't block outbound traffic, making it no more effective than the free Microsoft firewall included in Windows XP SP2.

We ran Norton Worm Protection against Steve Gibson's ShieldsUp security checker, which reported that our test PC successfully blocked most of the test Internet packets. Unfortunately, our test PC replied to the ShieldsUp Ping requests, meaning our computer was visible to the Internet -- not good. Typically, a computer running a full-on firewall won't respond to pings. Even with Worm Protection, Norton users will still need a firewall.

Like its predecessor, NAV 2005 scans for hidden spyware threats, including adware, diallers and keystroke loggers that record every key you tap. Unfortunately, its real-time scanner doesn't detect spyware; rather, NAV spots these menaces during only a full system scan or a QuickScan, the latter running immediately after virus-definition downloads. Overall scanning speed was respectable. In our informal tests, NAV took 37 minutes to scan a 12GB partition.

NAV 2005's list price remains unchanged at £44.99 (inc. VAT) and is comparable to the cost of Trend Micro's PC-cillin Internet Security 11, which includes a full firewall and anti-spam tools not found in NAV 2005.

Performance

In our labs tests, running Norton AntiVirus 2005 results in the same amount of drag on system performance as running McAfee's VirusScan and Trend Micro's PC-cillin. The lightest hit on system resources comes from Computer Associates' eTrust EZ Antivirus 2005. Norton took longer to scan our 1.3GB hard drive than either PC-cillin or EZ Antivirus.

To measure NAV 2005's impact on system performance, we use BAPCo's SysMark 2002, an industry-standard benchmark. The Internet-content-creation portion of SysMark measures desktop performance running off-the-shelf applications, such as Adobe's Photoshop, Microsoft's Windows Media Encoder, and Macromedia's Dreamweaver. We did not run the office productivity portion of the benchmark because it incorporates McAfee's VirusScan 5.13.

Our test system was a Dell Dimension 8200 running Windows XP Professional, with an Intel Pentium 4 1.9GHz processor and 256MB of RDRAM. With NAV running, our test system scored 94 percent -- meaning a 6 percent reduction in overall system speed. By comparison, VirusScan also scored a 94. An Internet-content-creation score of 100 represents the performance of our test system without any extraneous software running. In a test of scanning speed, NAV took an average of 6.1 minutes to scan a 1.3GB directory, slightly faster than VirusScan, which averaged 6.68 minutes.

Antivirus software: impact on system performance
	Test system	Norton AntiVirus 2005	McAfee VirusScan 9.0 (2005)	Trend Micro PC-cillin Internet Security 11	CA eTrust EZ Antivirus 2005
SysMark2002 Internet-content-creation (ICC) score	233	220	219	227	233
Normalised score	100	94	94	94	100
Percentage degradation	n/a	6	6	6	0
Average boot time (s)	38.9	71	51	45	47
Scan 1.3GB directory; average scan time (min.)	n/a	6.1	6.68	2.48	2.56

NAV has been tested on Windows desktop systems 10 times since November 2000 by the independent testing organisation VirusBulletin and earned its coveted VB 100 Percent title each time. NAV is one of the few products tested to consistently win the VB 100 Percent award. By comparison, McAfee's VirusScan was tested only once, at which time it earned the VB 100 Percent title. Previous versions of NAV have also been certified by the independent antivirus-testing laboratories at West Coast Checkmark, ICSA Labs, and Checkvir.com.

Service & support

Symantec's phone support is available between 9am and 5pm Monday to Friday, but it'll cost you -- to the tune of £18 per incident.

Symantec's help site also includes the Automated Support Assistant, a downloadable utility that scans Norton AntiVirus for known problems. However, the assistant needs more tooling. For example, when we disabled Auto-Protect, NAV's real-time virus scanner, the Automated Support Assistant reported no irregularities on our system -- oops. Symantec also offers email support, but you'll need to run the Automated Support Assistant before firing off a query.

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