Norton has come up with beta version of the awaited 2010 release. Symantec claims the beta version of its latest Internet Security program to be “the fastest, most effective security solution we have ever offered”. Norton also says that they have gone ahead to utilize “reputation-based security technologies” rather than using the conventional signature-based security technologies. Which one of these stand out, can only be seen by the end of this year when we hope to see the final release of this product.
You can download the beta version from here.
The first thing you will notice after downloading the file is that it needs some further downloading of 90MB or so. If the installation goes without a hitch consider yourself lucky. Then you will need to further download the latest definition files and then you are free to scan your system. I had already uninstalled my NOD32 but I have heard that NIS may actually uninstall other AVs before installing itself. So you better think twice before putting it on your main computer. I wonder who will go to this length to try a NIS which is good only for 14 days. Well, I did.
The GUI is more or less the same as that of 2009 which is good in the sense that it tries to stick to the purpose of being an AV rather than a fancy GUI whose learning curve would increase every year. I don’t get the point of showing CPU usage. Anyways, the GUI gives a good feel to use and you may actually spend a few minutes clicking on few buttons which mean nothing to you but they look cool.
The relevant new stuff I found was NIS 2010’s anti-spam portion is based on a new engine and that they have introduced a new word for the old act, “Autopsy”. It gives information about different threats your system may be facing. There is actually a lot of new stuff especially regarding statistics of different kinds. What I like is the way they are presented.
