In recent years, some users have found that Norton's security products take a considerable toll on PC performance.

The new edition of Norton 360, Symantec's all-round security software, attempts to alleviate this while maintaining a high level of protection for the computer.

Installation this time was quick, easy and glitch-free, with no error messages. The program offered to run a quick virus and spyware scan before installation, which is sensible, as some viruses can interfere with the installation of anti-virus programs. The whole installation took less than 10 minutes.

Norton 360 required much less configuration than Norton products we have used in the past. There was an absence of irritating pop-up alerts and warnings asking us to confirm we were happy to allow commonly used programs such as Internet Explorer or music download services to access the internet.

Virus and firewall protection was top-notch: the program managed to detect and disinfect all five recent threats that we unleashed on our test computer. It was a simple process to remove these and the program’s scanning time was impressive.

We found that the additional modules offered by Norton 360 – a disk defragmenter, automatic file backup, registry cleaner and junk file remover – varied in their effectiveness. The automatic backup module had serious shortcomings in its ease of use, for instance. It was difficult to select individual files to back up, and despite the fact that we specified the manual backup option, it kept trying to run automatically.

The other features worked well, though. The registry cleaner is a genuinely useful and effective addition to the software, but we’d question the usefulness of the disk defragmenter, junk file remover and phishing protection when these are included with Windows and with Internet Explorer 7.

An automatic form-filling feature is intended to protect all of your passwords (you type in a master password to access them) and allow you to quickly fill in commonly requested fields such as names and addresses with a single click. This doesn’t work on sites that ask the user to type in security words, though, so we found it was of limited use.

Users also have to download and install an add-on pack if they wish to use the anti-spam and parental controls the program offers. This may be free, but it's a mystery why it couldn’t have been included on the installation CD. We were similarly unimpressed with the program’s update procedure, which involved calling up the Liveupdate wizard every time we started our PC.

Vista compatibiity: Yes