Symantec Norton Security Deluxe
Norton remains a great security choice, with 100% protection against malware in tests
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE 1yr, 5 devices, £19 (£23 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/279nor
The “Deluxe” in the name suggests extravagance, but the only difference between this and the single-user Standard edition is that you can install it on five devices (be they PCs, Macs or Android smartphones). There’s also a Premium edition, available for £30 a year, which supports up to ten devices and adds parental controls and a backup module with 25GB of cloud storage.
Whichever version you choose, you get the anti-malware engine, and this blocked every virus that AVComparatives threw at it, for a perfect 100% protection score. Admittedly, this was undermined by eight false positives – Bitdefender achieved equally effective malware protection without a mistake – but that’s surely better than letting a malicious program slip through the net.
Many of the suite’s secondary features come in the form of browser extensions. Norton Identity Safe does double duty as a password manager and an anti-phishing tool, warning you against entering your credentials into untrusted sites. The Norton Security Toolbar provides a security rating for every site you visit, and adds colour-coded indicators to search results in Google, Bing and Yahoo Note, though, that you don’t need to buy Norton Security to get these extensions – they’re also available as free standalone downloads.
The suite includes a disk defragmenter, a cleanup tool for temporary files and a tool for auditing and disabling startup items. To be blunt, this side of things smacks of padding the feature list, as all of these tools replicate functions that are already built into Windows.
One aspect of Norton Security that we like is its comprehensive settings interface. Tinkerers can browse through pages and pages of controls, and customise almost every aspect of the package’s behaviour. You’ll find extensive configuration options for Norton’s proprietary firewall as well, and a switch to engage Silent mode for those who don’t like to be disturbed.
Norton Security scores well in terms of system performance too, achieving “very fast” ratings for both web browsing and copying files back and forth. However, the real-time scanner incurred a noticeable delay when applications were launched for the first time: both Bitdefender and Kaspersky did better here.
Still, while Norton Security has its foibles, it was one of only four suites to attain a perfect protection score and may appeal to those who prefer to err on the side of caution.