Norman Security Suite Reviewer's Comments
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In a new offering from Norman, Norman Internet Security provides a comprehensive tool in the fight against online threats. An exciting batch of useful utilities comes together to bring you an Internet security suite that protects your computer while allowing you to work without interruption. As with any major product release, there are a few issues here and there, but most exist when removing it from your system. There can also be significant system hangs when navigating the menu's within the program. We also had significant issues with getting various programs to work correctly after uninstalling Norman Internet Security.
Norman Security Suite Screenshots. Click to Enlarge
Firewall:
Norman Internet Security includes the Norman firewall which works well at blocking any malicious attempts to access your computer once configured. However, the default configuration was less than spectacular. Our test machine required several restarts and firewall rule changes to get all of our software working with the firewall enabled. This was compounded by the fact that all of the programs we had issues with were already listed as allowed programs in the firewall rules.
After we got all of the kinks resolved, the firewall worked flawlessly. It blocked all but one of our attacks, and stopped our attempts to attack another machine from our test machine.
Norman seems to have done quite well with the firewall itself, but needs to work on the configuration utility.
Antivirus:
The antivirus scanner within Norman Internet Security is very effective. It picked up all of the viruses we had on the test system and caught all viruses that we compiled on our test system. The on demand scan was effective, but slow. Our test system only saw a minor performance slowdown in other programs while scanning.
Antispyware:
Norman Internet Security includes a basic antispyware suite that provides basic protection against threats such as trojans and other spyware threats. Unfortunately, it didn't remove tracking cookies that were present on the system. While this isn't a huge threat, we consider it a problem for any antispyware program.
Other Security/Features:
Parental controls are easy to configure and quite effective. The Parental Controls Wizard will guide you through everything from setting up additional users, password protections, time limitations and more. All of our attempts to go to pornographic and other negative websites were stopped by the parental controls included with Norman Internet Security.
Ease of Use:
Norman Internet Security is a pleasure to use when it comes to design and ease of use. It has a beautiful interface that is intuitive and full of useful information for each section of the program. Finding configuration options is also very easy because of how well everything is labeled and the flow of the menus. One problem with the menus is that they are quite slow sometimes. Clicking on an option will sometimes take several seconds for the subsequent menu to appear. We also encountered issues with our configuration changes not being applied correctly. This can make configuration slow at times, and takes away from the overall polish that Norman’s interface has.
Ease of Installation/Setup:
There were no problems during the install and initial configuration of Norman Internet Security. However, a severe problem existed when we uninstalled the product. Our system slowed to a halt and required us to kill several programs before we were able to even get our computers to start correctly. We also had continuous with several programs since the uninstall of Norman Internet Security. Common applications like MSN Live Messenger and Google Desktop had difficulties connecting to the Internet.
Help/Support:
Norman has many support options available including program help, FAQ's, forums, email support and phone support. There are also setup and usage guides that can be downloaded from the Norman support website.
Summary:
Norman Internet Security is an average security suite that still needs some work to make it to the top of the pack. Things such as a sketchy initial firewall configuration and some performance slowdowns when making configuration changes take away from the overall experience of using Norman Internet Security. The issues we had while removing the software from our test machine were a definite problem as well.
Norman does have many good points as well. Once configured, the firewall works very well. The virus scanner, while slow, caught all of our test viruses. The parental controls work very well and are a great addition to a new and growing program.
©2008 TopTenREVIEWS, Inc.
