Norton AntiVirus 2008

This antivirus suite is one ofthe flagship products ofSymantec Cor-poration.

Live Update facility comes as an integral part ofthe prod-uct, which was not the

case with the previous versions. The installationprocess is easy and the

interface is intuitive. You get options for all themajor functions on one

window, but users can't tweak settings to dif-ferent levels ofcustomization.

This AV deploys Symantec's heuristics-based SONAR technology, has features such

as 'Browser Defender',which blocks any spyware, and also blocks 'drive-by

downloads',whereby the download process begins without user's knowledge .

 It also allows scanning offiles through email and instant messengers

aswell, but supp-orts older ver-sions only. It did-n't support thelatest Yahoo

messenger 8.We installed thisAV solution on aWindows Vista machine, which was

infected with several viruses(including macros, 16 and 32-bit, archived, and

executables) andmalware. After updating the program and definitions using

LiveUpdate, we scanned the whole system. It detected and cleaned allviruses. We

also tried to open websites known for passing Trojansetc. It removed such

malware from the downloaded files. It main-tains a detailed activity log, which

was missing in Norton 360, butlacks Firewall, which Quick Heal AntiVirus 2007

(reviewed May 07) had.

BOTTOMLINE: A good AVsolution, but is slightly

expensivecompared to QuickHeal AV 2007 which even has a Firewall