Norton Internet Security 2012 Review - Best Antivirus protection 2012

Recently, we have discussed about the top 5 antivirus protection 2012 where one of the product we mentioned was Norton Internet Security 2012 from Symantec. This security product for Windows computer has existed since a long time ago and is quite reputed at the same time. However, using Norton was not at all pleasurable earlier as it was known to be a resource hog and has accordingly affected the end-user experience badly. However, with the passage of time Symantec released a number of new editions including the latest and best technology it has at its disposal to bring back the lost glory and once again conquer the market and outrank all other products of its kind by providing faster, lighter and most reliable protection to the Windows users from all threats and thereby securing data residing on the system. There is no doubt that it improved significantly in its functionality and has many good features to offer in their latest edition released as Norton Internet Security 2012. However, its performance as a security solution in Windows computer can be ascertained only after the feedbacks from different direction by the wide user community existing worldwide. After getting our hands on this out of the box product from Symantec and getting it work in our test system, here is what we found and experienced while using it:-

Simplified, Professional and Improved Interface

Well, the User Interface provided in the Norton Internet Security 2012 is the first improvement that we noticed and really got interested. It looked professional and quite usable with the core features placed in front while hiding all others underneath a slider panel. This makes sense as people are more inclined towards using some regular options like Scanning, Updating rather than dealing with Advanced tools and configurations. In this regard, the new interface does justice to the user requirements by placing the two regular features i.e. Scan and Live Update on top and the rest under Advanced link which on clicking unveils the Advanced Interface having lots of details and tools available therein. There is also a row of navigation links & buttons on top/bottom direction for making other essential features easily accessible.

The above screenshot represents the Advanced Interface that we were talking about in the previous para. It provides all existing features arranged together with informations regarding the status of services and options to configure them according to our requirements.

Norton Insight - Now with Application Ratings

Norton Insight is another quite helpful feature which extends the possibility to secure the system and also analyze the situation with the report it provides. It keeps an eye on all the items that is downloaded to the system and detects harmful scripts and programs in this process. What is more interesting here is that it now provides application ratings by analyzing the performance of such applications in millions of other computers tracked by Norton and thus suggests the reliability of using it by analyzing collected data and also its behaviors in the system. As such, it states what percentage of risk it poses in terms of virus threats or system stability and thereby helps decide whether to continue using it or trash the item. Another good utility that we can remember while using this feature in Norton Internet Security suite is that it prevents over-usage of bandwidth in case the system is using a limited data connection.

Faster Scanning and Effective Protection

In all our test, we found the scan process to be considerably faster taking near-about 45 minutes for complete scan of the system. It detected some infected files which were actually few extraction tools we downloaded some days back from a software directory. One of its good feature that we would like to state here is that even if the computer is already infected and you try to install this antivirus solution to your system, it can get rid of those malware even in the process of installation and won't get infected or hijacked while being installed. The real-time protection is effective in as much as we found while using it for a week. Protection while accessing internet is another good feature that is noteworthy and it threw a number of warnings while we tried to access some of the known bad sites that we bookmarked for the test. However, in a few occasions it didn't quite remove some detected threats and only triggered an alert which was annoying. Overall, we found the scanning speed and ability to fix threats quite acceptable as compared to its previous version as well as other similar products of its kind.

Behavioral Protection using Sonar 4

Among many other features, we can also mention the Norton Sonar protection which monitors the behavior of different processes and hunts down any suspicious activity to lock it or restrict its activity. It keeps a rating of all the processes and DLL files according to its behavior which in turn helps to get rid of new threats immediately based on its analysis. This is very useful service of Norton Internet Security 2012 as it can protect the system no matter what type of threat it is and from where it originates thus providing some peace of mind to all it users.

In addition to the above, there are many other good features which are improved with this newly released edition and although not a perfect solution to all the security problems, it is still worth a try and is recommended to all as it looks promising to keep the system clean and prevent intrusion. If you have not used it before, do try it once and share your views with us.