Norton AntiVirus 2002 By Larry J. Seltzer June 11, 2002

• Product: Norton AntiVirus 2002
• Direct Price: With one-year subscription, $49.95 direct
• Company Info: Symantec Corp., www.symantec.com

Editor Rating:

Symantec's Norton AntiVirus (NAV) has been our Editors' Choice each year since 1996. Consistently a leader in virus detection, it allows control over many options and is very intuitive. Norton AntiVirus 2002 maintains this stellar track record, offering excellent virus protection and superb handling of all common antivirus tasks.

Installation is straightforward, ending in an update of the software and virus definitions. NAV then prompts you to scan all the drives on your system. The installation also adds events to the Windows Task Scheduler for regular updates and weekly hard drive scans (Friday night by default, but you can change it). Surprisingly, NAV is the only product tested to use the operating system's scheduler instead of reinventing it.

NAV is one of the most aggressive products in terms of updating the client: By default it checks the server every 4 hours for virus definition changes on a LAN (the exact frequency changes with different connection types) and warns you if your definitions are two weeks out of date.

The main program interface is unconventional, offering no traditional menus. Common operations are completely straightforward, though the help system is awkward in places.

NAV checks inbound and outbound messages for all the major e-mail clients, and it scans SMTP and POP3 for all clients. The program also installs a special plug-in that runs whenever a Microsoft Office document is opened and presents special scanning options if any problems are detected.

If you suspect you might have a virus that NAV hasn't detected, you can use a wizard in the NAV Quarantine viewer to submit any suspicious files to the Symantec Antivirus Research Center (SARC) for analysis. SARC will analyze the file and report back to you. Other companies also have methods for submitting suspected viruses, but none are as easy as this.

NAV's on-demand scanning speed was second-rate, but the software's impact on system performance was an imperceptible 3 percent. And not surprisingly, it caught and cleaned all of the viruses on our virus detection tests.