Symantec is the world's biggest anti-virus vendor and has been for many years now, and it's partly for this reason that it is occasionally targeted by virus writers.

Symantec added features and bulk at startling pace and the Norton Internet Security 2006 (NIS 2006) edition hit critical mass. The 2007 edition has fewer notifications and has generally been slimmed down.

Installation was slow but painless. Norton Protection Center gives you a good overview of different aspects of your security. An extra wide Norton icon sits on the right in the taskbar showing if you're at risk or not.

The two-way firewall throws up very few messages and is automatically set up to allow common programs access to the internet.

To quantify some of the slowdown associated with security software we measured the time to boot into Windows using the free anti-virus software AVG 7.5 and the firewall Sygate 5.5, and then compared this to the start-up times on the same machine with only NIS 2007 installed.

With no security software installed our Pentium 4 2.2GHz, 512MB Ram test system took one minute 15 seconds to boot up. With AVG and Sygate the system took 26 seconds longer and with just NIS2007 installed the system took a further 42 seconds. Bear in mind this is on a clean system - on a system full of various programs the time it adds to the boot up process will increase.

A spam filter and parental control tool can be downloaded as free plug-ins. Symantec doesn't preinstall these it because it can severely affect the performance of older computers.

Kevin Hogan, a senior manager at Symantec recently predicted Web 2.0 attacks, VoIP attacks and fraud would become the biggest threat in 2007. Symantec has therefore included an updated anti-phishing bar for Internet Explorer.

Although it's a bit obtrusive, sitting below the tabs in IE, it stopped us from accessing fake Ebay and Paypal websites. However, it didn't prove so successful when we logged onto a fake Halifax banking website. It's also worth noting that the bar is incompatible with Firefox 1.5 and 2.

Symantec does everything very well with a clean interface and a phishing filter that works reasonably well. £49.99 is a high price to pay for software that doesn't excel, but we've seen it online for £19.99, which is much more reasonable.

If you're running Windows Vista, you'll need to download the Vista update from the Symantec site.

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