Coolz

The good: Internet Security 2009 has a leaner footprint, improved speed, white listing and other technologies to mark clean files as trusted, and free technical support.

The bad: Despite its free telephone support, Norton Internet Security 2009 lacks adequate online technical support and, either intentionally or not, drives users to its paid technical support services.

The bottom line: Norton Internet Security 2009 hits all the right security notes and its superior protection technologies might even win back some jaded anti-Symantec folks, though for some technical support may continue to frustrate

Norton has, in the recent past, included some sophisticated technology from its enterprise products, which is good because it's cutting-edge, but it's also bad, because it doesn't necessarily integrate with the product, nor is it necessary. In Norton Internet Security 2009, they seem to have found the right balance.

Whitelisting, the buzzword of security products for 2009, is included within the new suite, and by marrying it with other technologies, Symantec makes it more suited for the user. Files on a whitelist are deemed trusted, and thus do not need to be scanned as often. Not all "safe files" make it onto the whitelist. For those, Norton uses a community process, called Insight, similar to that used by other security products such as Haute Secure. The thinking is that if thousands of other people are using this suspicious file, chances are it's not a new piece of malware but a new application. On the other hand if only a few are using it, then maybe it's worth it to take another look to see if it's malware.

Norton enhances its home network monitor, giving you a system administrator's perspective on the relative health and security of all the computers within your home.

And Norton Internet Security 2009 brings back the concept of the Recovery Disk once popular in the early 1990s, but declines to include a backup solution (you'll have to buy another Symantec product for that).

Gone is the awful LiveUpdate component of past Norton products. With 2009 products, Symantec is providing antimalware definition signatures every few minutes or so. On the interface you'll see a notice indicating how many minutes since the last update. We didn't see definitions older than four minutes in our testing.

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Size -- 60 MB

Norton Internet Security 2009

Size -- 87 MB

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