Remember Symantec and their products? Sure you do. According to all the comments on various websites, blogs and forums, the company hasn't released a really good product since Norton Antivirus 2003 (great product, indeed) and past applications have not garnered very good reviews either. And yet it is the company with the biggest protection software sells.

But here comes a new product from Symantec: Norton Antivirus 2008. As always, they're a bit ahead of time and launched the final version of their antivirus. New design, new engine and new efficiency in securing your computer against malware.

I started testing NAV 2008 preparing for a long day. You know how long only the installation process takes, with all its protection updates, scanning of the computer, installation of Live Updates, application core components and all that. Well, in this case, the installation process took a little over three minutes (3'10'') on XP and less than ten minutes on Vista (there are more modules available).

The interface is quite a pleasant surprise as there are only two main menu options (Home with Protection Center and Norton Antivirus) available in the top part of the window. For each of these tabs you get a different set of options.

Home tab will show what protection modules are enabled and secure. The modules vary from Vista to XP as the former comes with eleven of them (account control, protection updates, spyware protection, Windows Automatic Update, virus and spyware scan, virus protection, inbound firewall, spyware definitions, IE settings, outgoing and incoming email scanning) while XP has only eight (save Windows Account Control, spyware definitions and IE settings).

Protection Center is easy to configure as it deals with Security Status Alerts and all there is to do with it is make the protection status available in Windows Sidebar (on Vista) or in Windows Taskbar (on XP) and enable showing messages from Windows Security Center.

More hardcore options are available in antivirus settings where you can configure real-time protection, scanning types, exclusions of signatures or spyware categories to keep tab on. Antivirus settings window is extremely easy to use and as soon as you leave one category, it will automatically dock so you won't have any trouble at all finding the right setting.

General menu allows turning on password protection (secure the settings area with a countersign), Norton products protection (secures them against unauthorized changes) and make visible auto protect icon in system tray (it'll show computer protection status). More than this, you can make yourself part of the Norton Community Watch and automatically send security and application data to Symantec.

Live Update section lets you enable the automatic update process, get notification when updates are available and set the NAV 2008 to run a quick scan after protection updates have been downloaded. This way, your computer will be scanned with NAV having the latest definitions installed.

Things get a bit more complicated when it comes to Real-Time Protection as there are a few more options to consider. If Suspicious Activity Monitor is turned on, each shady action of the softwares installed on your machine will be recorded. During our testing, NAV 2008 successfully detected three programs that modified Startup Settings, provided details on the risk level and recommended an action to be taken (check History option in the main application window). For alerts of suspicious actions taking place on your computer you should keep Advanced Mode turned on.

Removable media can also be a malware carrier and Norton can scan them whenever inserted in the computer. Microsoft Office documents are considered as well and the application can keep them protected if you have Office 2000 or later.

Auto-Protect feature makes available four options, all of them bearing self-explanatory names: Turn on Auto-Protect, Load Auto-Protect during system startup (will slow down startup loading), Turn on Bloodhound heuristics (protects you against unknown malware) and Turn on Caching (frequently accessed files will be logged and will not be scanned, thus improving the performance of your computer).

Integrated email protection lets you set NAV 2008 to scan both incoming and outgoing messages for viruses and set an action in case a malware form is encountered (automatically remove or ask the user).

Your file sending via instant messenger is also in the attention of Norton Antivirus 2008. The supported applications are Yahoo! Messenger (versions 5.0 through 6.1), AOL Instant Messenger (versions 4.7 through 5.9), Windows Live Messenger (starting version 6.0) and Trillian (starting version 3.1). The application will scan the attachment for any form of malware your computer might be forced to face.

Worms are a very known and feared form of malware crawling on shady websites. NAV has an answer for them too as it can protect against attacks from worms outside your network or analyze incoming network traffic. Additional options that can be enabled include allowing local networks unrestricted access to your computer (although I would not turn this on) and monitoring only the worm signatures you choose.

To enforce the protection even more, Norton Antivirus 2008 is equipped with a mini firewall that can restrict local program's access to the Internet (Program Control). Customizing Internet Worm Protection is the proof of the application's flexibility as it lets you configure the way worm protection handles connections for all programs of your computer.

Scanning options permit the user to enable nosing inside packed files and scanning active programs and startup files. These two options are turned on by default and if you want to give your computer the best protection, I suggest you leave them unchanged.
More protection is applied to your computer by enabling SONAR Scan (Symantec Online Network for Advanced response). This is actually in the category of proactive protection and secures the machine against unknown security risks. Key loggers, rootkits and tracking cookies are also closely monitored by Norton Antivirus and these options conclude the protection settings suite offered by the application.

Sometimes you do not want some disks, drives, folders or files to be scanned for malware or leave protected. In this case, NAV 2008 makes available Exclusions menu allowing you to set the locations, security risks and types of spyware that should not benefit from protection or should be avoided during scan. The list of signatures is quite extensive but customizing the view by selecting a category of malware to be displayed and then typing in the window the starting letter of the item you are looking for should speed up the search.

It seems that NAV 2008 comes more prepared than ever as it includes home networking settings. Actually, there is only one setting and that is defining the communication port for remote monitoring a NAV 2008 equipped computer in the network.

You may have noticed in the main application window that the program can also display the Network Map. The fact of the matter is that it can detect all the devices available in the network allowing you to label them the way you see fit (change name and icon). In the left part of Network Security Map there is displayed the total number of devices connected together. More than this, you can enable remote monitoring for those computers running the latest versions of Norton Antivirus and Norton Internet Security.

All in all, the application took a huge step forward as detection has been improved and has a very small footprint in computer resources (about 15MB in Task Manager). During our testing, Norton Antivirus 2008 recorded the best malware detection (97 out of 160) but it failed to remove all the nasties (it took a little over one minute to complete scanning about 20MB of malware). In fact, it could remove only five malicious files leaving the rest of them to manual removal.

The Good

The looks and the feel of the new and improved antivirus from Symantec is incredible. Easy to use and with a hell of a detection skill NAV 2008 is a very good solution for getting a grip on the threats installed on your computer and keeping the machine quite safe.

It uses few resources, even during the scan and the computer did not feel loaded.

The installation process is very fast considering the size of the installer and starting the application was snappy both on Vista and on XP.

The Bad

The malware used during testing is not the latest and the meanest and yet NAV managed to detect 97 out of 160. It is a good detection, but it failed to remove all of them, as opposed to another antivirus that detected 84 of them but after the Delete action none of them were left standing.

Also, after disinfection is performed, the user does not have the possibility of automatically deleting the malware. The only option available was reading Symantec's review of the malware.

There is no proper Quarantine section in the application. Going to Manage Quarantined Items in Norton Antivirus tab of the main application window will actually open History of the detected and deleted items.

The Truth

Better detection than ever, but a failure in disinfection. It runs fast and needs few computer resources, the interface is extremely responsive and snappy at starting the software, but there is one big flaw: it cannot eliminate all the items it detects.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: