Time-and our survey responses-will tell if Norton's new-found consumer-oriented posturing is legitimate or if it's just lip service.įor now the downside to these great promises is that they're still doing tech support from offshore, which means dealing with a call center in India.
Here's the interesting part: they've gone the way of VIPRE and ESET and are now offering free help with virus removal if your computer is infected while you're running their software.Įven more interestingly, they're even backing it up with a money-back guarantee. For starters, Symantec has a searchable knowledgebase that'll answer most questions, along with chat and phone support. Norton's technical support has improved tremendously this year. And worse, it can leave you feeling much less confident about whether you've made the best choices for your security or not. If you do ever need to venture deeper into Norton's antivirus software, the overall presentation of things makes it such that the options themselves can get confusing. The downside is: there's such a thing as too many choices when they're not presented appropriately. The major sections you might need are clearly labeled with modern looking icons and buttons.įor more advanced users, there are enough levers and switches to control just about any aspect of this antivirus software. We were still able to perform basic computer tasks like web surfing and file downloading with no negligible drag from Norton.įor the most part, Norton's user interface is easy to use and simple enough for anyone.
Norton free mac antivirus review full#
When running a full scan, Norton drained about 14% of system resources, which isn't that bad, but leaves room for improvement. Resource usage was average for Norton, but still within an acceptable range.īoot time with Norton Security installed was a little on the slow side at a 7% slower rate than its competitors.
Norton free mac antivirus review series#
Then in another series of tests, Norton left vulnerable ports open. During one section of our tests, Norton failed to block 50% of our attempts to bypass it. Unfortunately, our firewall tests revealed only average results for Norton Security Standard. It's the moat surrounding your castle where the only way in and out is over a secure drawbridge. Overall, poor performance for Norton Security Standard when it comes to realtime protection and virus/malware removal.Ī firewall is your first line of defense against hackers and some types of malware trying to get onto your computer.
This type of rogueware could easily steal your money.
The first time we saw it, it even took us a minute to realize it wasn't the real Norton. The curious thing is that it looks strikingly similar to Norton with the same colors and similar layout. To add insult to injury, a rogue antivirus program (a program pretending to be legitimate antivirus software) installed itself. In another set of tests, we downloaded and pre-installed large malware sets then ran a full-system scan with Norton to see if it could cleanup and/or delete these malicious files.Įven though Norton Security successfully detected and remove 80% of our malware samples, there were still 20% that got through undeterred by Norton. Yeah, Norton really dropped the ball here for real-time protection.