Norton AntiVirus 2000 review

Anyone who ever met Peter Norton couldn't help but be impressed by his level of knowledge when it comes to PCs and operating systems.

Sadly, Peter's company was bought out by Symantec quite a while ago, and, although this anti-virus software carries his name, it's no longer a real Peter Norton product.

Prevention

Norton AntiVirus 2000 offers standard definition-based scanning for viruses and, like all of the software in this test, picked up on our boot-sector virus at install time. It goes resident by default, and has become infamous for causing system disruption for some time. It takes quite a heavy toll on processing power, and caused two crashes on the test machine. It incorporates 'Live Update', which logs onto the Norton web site to download new definions, which are updated weekly.

Cure

Norton requires a clean boot from previously created floppy disks in order to carry out much of its cleansing work, but it does tackle all the main types of virus. Any completely unknown ones can be forwarded to the Norton web site for inspection by the company's virus experts. AntiVirus can scan e-mail attachments as they arrive (patching your e-mail programs in order to do it), and automatically clean them, a process we were unfortunately unable to test.

Overall

Norton AntiVirus 2000, in our experience, doesn't live well alongside many other programs users are likely to have running in the Windows environment, especially software designed to prevent crashes and the like. User reports of problems being caused by AntiVirus - as well as our own - are many. Too many, in fact, for us to be happy about recommending this product.

Author: - David Dorn