Extra featuresĪway from basic security, Norton has a dizzying array of extra features, although which are available to you will depend on the package you buy. With all the other numbers crunched, Norton Security gets an overall system impact rating of 7%, which puts it in third position behind ESET Smart Security and Microsoft Security Essentials in terms of performance impact. Its scans are pretty quick, too our first system scan took a little over nine minutes, while a subsequent scan was completed in just over two. System startup time was increased from 17s to 20s with Norton installed, a small price to pay for increased protection.

It's not a small piece of software it takes up 393MB of disk space, but compared to its competition that's comparatively lightweight. In our new system performance rankings, Norton proved to be among the the least obtrusive packages available. This points to well-calibrated threat monitoring software that means Norton won't be a pain to live with day-to-day one of the main reasons why you might want to stop using any given anti-virus service. It was also steadfast when it came to the installation of legitimate software: at no point during our testing did it pop up unnecessary warnings about risky software and instead just let us get on with it. It was able to bat off just about every threat we threw at it it only lost two points for allowing a potential threat to run before neutralising it without the threat causing any lasting damage. On Windows PCs, Norton Security put in a near-perfect score of 298 out of 300, just a fraction behind the perfect score of Kaspersky Internet Security. For starters, if you're an individual, you don't really need to worry about the family-focused Premium and you'll probably want to stick with Standard, or Deluxe if you have more than one computer or handheld device.

The best anti-virus software of 2015: revealedĪside from increasing the number of licences you can install Norton on (One, five and ten respectively), the increasing tiers also unlock extra features: some useful, some less so. There are several options available, called Standard (£30/year), Deluxe (£40/year) and Premium (£50/year). Instead of products released each year under a new name (2014, 2015 etc), you now just have a rolling subscription to a frequently-updated service. Symantec has changed the way you can buy its Norton Security products.

Norton security premium review