Over the past few years, security suites have managed to pick up a bad reputation for being bloated and slowing down the PCs on which they are installed. They are, in fact, sometimes regarded as necessary evils—users install them, but only begrudgingly. They aren’t entirely wrong to feel this way, since it’s true that the burdens imposed by such software on CPU utilization, hard disk space usage and even overall system boot time have ballooned out of proportion. When this happens, some users ditch the suites and instead combine separate antivirus, antispyware and firewall applications (often free ones), but plenty of them just do without any sort of protection at all.
Symantec has identified unnecessary bloat as the main area in which the 2009 editions of its products can be improved, and so we have Norton 360 version 3.0, which makes the bold claims of being able to be installed in less than one minute, using less than 10 MB of RAM at idle, and occupying less than 100 MB of disk space (without the definition files that accumulate over time). Those claims, and a couple of interesting new concepts for handling security altogether, are what make this suite interesting.

Norton 360 has always been a security
suite for beginners, or those less comfortable with the nitty-gritties of configuring alerts and managing permissions. It’s designed to require near-zero configuration during and after installation, and combine all functions into a simple interface. It’s positioned below Norton Internet Security in terms of sheer configurability and power, but also includes a broader set of features than NIS. While both suites include antivirus, antispyware and firewall capabilities, Norton 360 also includes data backup and PC tuning utilities (since NIS users would probably want to manage these themselves).

Interface and usage
We found that the installation went surprisingly fast, but still a bit over the one-minute figure estimated by Symantec on our slightly dated Athlon 64 FX-based testbed which uses 1 GB of RAM. Once installed, you see a simple window with a large status indicator and four groups of functions in the middle, and two rows of other options along the top and bottom edges. The status indicator simply lights up in green, orange or red depending on whether or not all the components of the suite are active and up to date (and Windows Vista users can also enable a rather pointless sidebar gadget that does exactly the same thing, but is always visible). The four modules also show their individual statuses and reveal additional commands when hovered over, although this behavior might not be immediately apparent to first-time users.
The main window seems neat and sparse, which explains why almost every single clickable link pops up a new window. Each function resides in its own window, making it somewhat difficult to remember what lives where. A single tabbed or categorized interface would have made work a bit smoother.

Features
The first of the four modules is broadly named “PC Security”, and includes the scanning and firewall functions. The scanning engine clubs antivirus and antimalware into a single unit, sparing users the trouble of worrying about the fine distinction between them.

Norton 360 approaches scanning in a rather different way—by using MD5 checksums of common files to determine whether or not they need to be scanned at all. Rather than combing through the thousands of system files created by Windows and most common software, the Norton Insight module pulls “trust” data from a network of over 21 million registered Symantec product users. Only files that have been altered or are unique to a computer, such as those recently created or downloaded from the Internet, receive a full scan. When a file is altered, whether by malware or a genuine update, it will lose all trust until the community is able to vouch for it again.
This approach eliminated around 90 percent of the files from our machine with a fresh Windows Vista installation, speeding up scan times considerably as compared to other antivirus engines. Updates are delivered as often as every five minutes, rather daily or weekly, to avoid large downloads choking your Internet connection.

The firewall is configured by default to be as quiet as possible, i.e. not throw dozens of confirmation popups at users until programs are either whitelisted or blacklisted. Programs are automatically sorted for the most part. You can of course disable the automatic firewall (after which the alerts do get pretty large and intrusive), or you can set customized rules for each program and protocol. You can even have a program’s behavior logged, to let it roam freely but also check up on its behavior later.
The second main module is called “Identity Protection”, which is again a rather broad way of lumping all the online security functions together. The main feature here is the Identity Safe, which manages all your passwords, standard form data, and credit card information. It can import saved data from Internet Explorer, but no other browser. IE gains a toolbar with a button for managing your Identity Safe and it should work with Firefox as well, but Opera and Chrome are left out. Other online security tools include an antiphishing filter and Safe Web, which flags potentially unsafe results in any search engine and creates a social community where such flags can be discussed and contested.

The Backup module is fairly simple. You can configure backup sets by answering three simple questions—what, where, and when. The default set backs up your Documents folder to the free online storage space you get with your annual subscription. In Automatic mode, backups are made incrementally whenever your PC is idle. You can specify any storage medium as the backup target, but online storage is convenient and safe. Symantec gives you 2 GB of space with the Standard edition, and 25 GB with the Premier edition (which is also the only difference between the two). Be warned though, your online backups will be wiped out if your subscription runs out, after a brief grace period.
And finally, the PC Tuneup module contains the maintenance and tweaking tools. Most noteworthy is the Startup Manager which actually measures how much of a load each item puts on your system. The coolest feature is that you can not only disable items, but delay them by 10 minutes, which lets you start working much sooner after your PC boots up. Other tasks include disk optimization and cleanup, which work as they should. A Diagnostic Report sums up your PC’s configuration and health, alerting you to weak areas. You can also monitor Norton’s own CPU and RAM utilization, which is mostly just a bit of self-promotion!

Conclusion
The Norton 360 is a mostly uncomplicated tool for anyone who wants security without configuration headaches. The price for the Standard Edition with 3 user support is Rs. 3,760.