- Apr 25, 2013
- 5,355
Developer Symantec, best known for its premium antivirus products, has released a beta version yesterday for the highly-anticipated Norton Security 2015 and Norton Security 2015 with Backup. Users and testers are welcome to try out the new product before its official release and report any bugs, issues, or suggestions. The trial period lasts 7 days.
Before getting into the whole installation, however, we can notice that Symantec made some tweaks to the product names. Norton Internet Security has become Norton Security, while Norton 360 has turned into Norton Security with Backup. As for the setup pack, everything is pretty much still the same. Installation is carried out fast and users are not given the possibility to exclude components from the package.
Performance results
The moment of truth: Norton Security 2015 Beta is clearly cleaner, friendlier, and more attractive than before, putting special emphasis on adapting its features to novice users' requirements. Well, that's not really possible since the application comes bundled with numerous settings for advanced usage.
However, the part that interests us the most is performance, namely scan speed, real-time responsiveness, malware detection ratio, and impact on resource usage.
We submitted a collection of 8,502 virus samples worth 2.36GB, which did not include zero-day (dangerous) threats. The testing machine was an Intel Core i5-3470 with CPU @3.20GHz and 12GB RAM, running Windows 8.1 Pro. Default settings were applied.
The real-time guard was on alert, detecting the infected files as soon as they were extracted from the password-protected archive. It took it a while to remove all of them, but marked only 332 files as malware, leaving behind 8,170 items.
After this step, we ran a contextual scan with default settings on the remaining files. After a painfully long amount of time (almost 3 hours), Norton finally finished the scan-and-remove job. It removed 4,956 additional files and left behind 3,214 items. We ran an extra scan job to be safe and the tool managed to eliminate another 1,524 files, leaving behind Overall, its success ratio was roughly 82%. We expected better results.
A 44.5GB directory with 271,090 items was scanned in 10 minutes and 42 seconds. CPU and RAM consumption was low during this time.
The biggest bugs we found were when attempting to run Norton Security on Windows 8.1 Pro. It failed to obtain the necessary updates at startup. Plus, after a reinstallation, we noticed that time passed very quickly in Symantec's universe, because the trial period was marked as expired (instead of the seven-day period).
Conclusion
Thankfully, this is only the beta version, so bugs and various issues are to be expected, as they will most likely get fixed before the program's official release. In the meantime, Norton Security 2015 has to work on its malware detection ratio and removal speed, because we were not impressed with this beta. On the other hand, it has never looked better.
Users can download Norton Security 2015 and Norton Security 2015 with Backup for themselves to run tests as long as theykeep in mind that the beta version is unstable.
Full Article
Before getting into the whole installation, however, we can notice that Symantec made some tweaks to the product names. Norton Internet Security has become Norton Security, while Norton 360 has turned into Norton Security with Backup. As for the setup pack, everything is pretty much still the same. Installation is carried out fast and users are not given the possibility to exclude components from the package.
Performance results
The moment of truth: Norton Security 2015 Beta is clearly cleaner, friendlier, and more attractive than before, putting special emphasis on adapting its features to novice users' requirements. Well, that's not really possible since the application comes bundled with numerous settings for advanced usage.
However, the part that interests us the most is performance, namely scan speed, real-time responsiveness, malware detection ratio, and impact on resource usage.
We submitted a collection of 8,502 virus samples worth 2.36GB, which did not include zero-day (dangerous) threats. The testing machine was an Intel Core i5-3470 with CPU @3.20GHz and 12GB RAM, running Windows 8.1 Pro. Default settings were applied.
The real-time guard was on alert, detecting the infected files as soon as they were extracted from the password-protected archive. It took it a while to remove all of them, but marked only 332 files as malware, leaving behind 8,170 items.
After this step, we ran a contextual scan with default settings on the remaining files. After a painfully long amount of time (almost 3 hours), Norton finally finished the scan-and-remove job. It removed 4,956 additional files and left behind 3,214 items. We ran an extra scan job to be safe and the tool managed to eliminate another 1,524 files, leaving behind Overall, its success ratio was roughly 82%. We expected better results.
A 44.5GB directory with 271,090 items was scanned in 10 minutes and 42 seconds. CPU and RAM consumption was low during this time.
The biggest bugs we found were when attempting to run Norton Security on Windows 8.1 Pro. It failed to obtain the necessary updates at startup. Plus, after a reinstallation, we noticed that time passed very quickly in Symantec's universe, because the trial period was marked as expired (instead of the seven-day period).
Conclusion
Thankfully, this is only the beta version, so bugs and various issues are to be expected, as they will most likely get fixed before the program's official release. In the meantime, Norton Security 2015 has to work on its malware detection ratio and removal speed, because we were not impressed with this beta. On the other hand, it has never looked better.
Users can download Norton Security 2015 and Norton Security 2015 with Backup for themselves to run tests as long as theykeep in mind that the beta version is unstable.
Full Article
