Symantec Norton Internet Security 2005 Antispyware Edition

Symantec, like McAfee, is one of the big names in net security, and a relatively recent arrival at the anti-spyware party. In fact, this product isn’t really a standalone spyware removal tool at all. It’s Norton Antivirus with a few extra definitions thrown in to help it detect some extra activity from spyware programs.

And, on the basis of our tests, it hasn’t had that many definitions added. As we
explain elsewhere, it’s hard to compare performance when all the programs use
different terminology, but when a program reports only four items of potential spyware when others are reporting 10 or 20, it’s perhaps not as thorough. That’s doubly disappointing considering that a full scan took more than an hour longer than the next slowest application in our tests, and system performance as a whole suffered from the Norton slow-down effect.

To add insult to injury, we were warned about MSN Messenger starting up, 9MB of
updates had to be downloaded on the first run, and after the long wait for a scan, we still had to endure pop-up ads. At least the home page hijack was detected and changed to a handy Symantec Knowledgebase article explaining how we could set it back to what we wanted.