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My main reason for doing this review on this software was to see if Norton's had done anything to improve their performance with their products and to see if Macs are as impervious to viruses as people claim. The software came on a CD with a quick start guide and a more detailed instruction manual, as well as this guide put on the CD in a PDF version.

According to the Nortons website this version scans for both Mac and PC software vulnerabilities and viruses, which is great for a lot of Mac users that have a Mac in a PC network or are duel booting between Mac OS X and Windows, or using one of the VM programs that are out there now.

 

Installation & Documentation


Ease of use


Value for money


Price approx
$ 49 USD

Software/Hardware Requirements
Mac OS X version 10.4.10 or higher
Mac with PowerPC or Intel Core processor
128 MB of RAM
100 MB of available hard disk space
Internet connection required for LiveUpdate

Available from
www.symantec.com

 

For the install, you need to be running Mac OS X 10.4.10 and above, 128Mb ram and 100Mb hard drive space and an Internet connection for updates.

The install was very fast. All I had to do was insert the CD and click on the install icon, then the installer asked where I would like to install it to. Once started, all the install process needed was 85.4 Mb space to install on to, so great if you have a small hard drive. It took just under 2 minutes to install. Once installed it asked me if I would like to update the virus definitions. The program downloaded the 28 Mb update very quickly and once the computer restarted, you could not really tell that Norton's had installed apart from a little icon in the top right corner of the screen.

The install was far quicker than their previous versions. The only comment I would make is that it lacked an auto prompt to register the program. For this info I had to refer to the instruction manual to find out how to register.

Once restarted, I ran the Norton's program by accessing it via the quick start icon in the menu bar at the top-right of the screen. You are greeted with a status screen (see below) which gives you very clear info about when the last virus scan was done, last update, when your subscription runs out as well as what state the automatic protection is in. A secondary tab gives you access to scheduling the updates and scans, with the Mac signature padlock at the bottom of the screen so you can stop prying fingers from changing any settings. The layout of these screens is very clear and easy to follow, which in my opinion is a big leap forward over previous Mac versions and even Windows based virus protection.

As every virus conscious person should do, I ran a manual virus check. I found this very slow as the scan took over 5 hours to scan 251 Gb of data. I don't know if this was to make it use less of your computer resources or that it just doesn't preform that well. As you will see in the screen shot of the activity monitor (see below) the CPU usage was the ram. This would be particularly good if you are running a slower computer. I was able to continue to watch a movie and surf the internet without any slowing or problems, and that does deserve a thumbs up. Most Norton's products I have used before have slowed the machine so much I couldn't do anything while scanning for viruses. That said, I would still advise running the virus scans at a time when you will be away from your computer.

At the end of the scan I was very surprised to find a report stating that I had 35 infections on my Time Machine drive. It was Trojan nebular, after a bit of looking around the Norton's web site I found that it was a Window's based virus that affects Windows 95,98,2k and XP. There was no reference to it affecting any version of the Mac OS, meaning that my computer could have been infecting PCs with viruses. After clicking on the repair option Norton's could not repair any of the infected files, so it moved them all into quarantine. Yet again this Norton's product has done what it said it would by removing PC related infections.

Norton's did claim that it is an "always on" protection system, but when downloading a file off the internet I could not see any evidence that Norton's scanned this potentially harmful file. Maybe this is the new part of the program where it does more work in the background with less interference to the user. But I do think a notification would have been nice. When downloading emails again there was no notification that each email or attachment was being scanned. 

To sum up this product it looks good, has the Mac feel to it, has a fast install and update, which is a marked improvement on their last versions. The virus scan is little slow, but they did pick up a Windows-based Trojan in a compressed file. It hardly used any CPU or RAM, freeing your computer up for other programs to use. My only real complainta about this software are that it lacks an auto prompt to register and that there is no evidence that it scans downloaded files or emails. As far as it finding viruses/Trojans on my prize Mac, maybe it is time for all of us die-hard Mac fans that think we can't get those nasty PC bugs on our computers to wise-up and use some anti-virus protection. If not to protect us, then maybe to protect our poor friends still running Windows-based computers.

Comments (3)

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Loweded Wookie said: January 30, 2008 | url    Votes: +0

	With this virus do you have Windows installed? Does it have a Windows version on the same disc? Just curious.
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jondow said: January 30, 2008   Votes: +0

	would be great if it did come with a windows version too, but no. and yes i did have vista installed at the same time but it found them in the time machine and mac part of the computer and the files were listed as being there long before i installed vista on my mac
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Loweded Wookie said: January 30, 2008 | url    Votes: +0

If Vista is installed via Parallels or VMWare then you will find that it is checking inside the virtual machine itself. If it is installed via BootCamp then it will be scanning the Windows partition created by BootCamp. The virus itself is reasonably harmless if you're using broadband as it is an old school dialer virus meaning it dials a toll number to a porn server, not exactly free porn but at least you won't have to supply your credit card details.

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