Symantec Norton AntiVirus Basic

In addition to the expected quick, full, and custom antivirus scans, you can launch the aggressive Norton Power Eraser, scan files with Norton Insight to identify known safe files, or run a diagnostic report to help with troubleshooting.

The initial full scan with Norton AntiVirus took almost two hours. If after such a scan you suspect malware may still be lurking, you can click a link near the bottom left to launch Norton Power Eraser.

Norton Insight checks all the programs on your PC against Symantec's huge database of known and trusted programs, reporting the trust level, prevalence (among Norton users), and resource usage for each. Subsequent antivirus scans can skip files marked as trusted.

In testing, Norton quarantined many malware samples on sight. It killed off most of the rest at launch time, whisking them away so quickly that it left Windows confused.

Tested with recently discovered malware-hosting URLs, Norton blocked about a third at the URL level, so the browser never even reached the dangerous site.

In that same malicious URL test, Norton handles another two thirds by quarantining the download, for an overall protection rate of 99 percent.

Norton's browser protection also steered the browser away from phishing websites. However, it scored very poorly in the antiphishing test, a surprising result given that it used to ace this test.

The Scam Insight feature caught some fraudulent pages based on characteristics including the site's age and the number of Norton users who had encountered it.

Challenged to defend a test system against exploit attacks, Norton scored better than any competing product, blocking the attacks at the network level and frequently (as seen here) identifying the attack by its official name and number.

Among this product's many bonus features is a local antispam component that filters out spam from POP3 email accounts and integrates with Microsoft Outlook.