The first and (still) the best known name in anti-virus and internet security is Symantec's Norton brand, but does it deserve its fame?

Norton Internet Security (NIS) 2007 consists of anti-virus, personal firewall, anti-spyware and anti-phishing components, but the observant will have noticed that something's missing - anti-spam. However, this (and parental controls) can be downloaded as an add-on pack for free. Symantec's reasoning is that anti-spam take up a lot of system memory and can slow older computers down, therefore leaving the choice with the consumer.

Installing NIS 2007 is simple enough. Once the installation program has checked there's nothing untoward already on your PC, the main screen displays your PC’s current status with a big green tick or red cross to indicate threats. Within the various monitor screens, which are still not that obvious to navigate, you can tailor the components of the suite, but for most purposes Symantec’s defaults are fine.

NIS 2007 can take a little while to ‘bed in’ to your system, as it learns what you do and what you expect it to allow. For example, a website we often use, which links to many others, caused an alert as we followed links the first few times we used it after installing the Norton software. Within a day or so, though, NIS 2007 had learned it should permit the action and gave us no further trouble.

The firewall is two-way, meaning it can detect unauthorised messages coming out of your PC, as well as those trying to come in. This is useful as a second safeguard, in case spyware tries phoning home, or a virus attempts to propagate itself. From our experience, neither of these things happened, but it's good to have the extra safeguard.

Program and signature updates for the anti-virus and anti-spyware programs are loaded in the background and cause very little interruption. In fact, resource use with the new version seems noticeably lower than in previous years. A full system scan, which you should perform once a week, does slow things up a bit, but that's true of most file scans.

If you're happy to buy security suite which doesn't include any anti-spam software in the box, Norton Internet Security 2007 is an effective program at a good price.

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