Norton AntiVirus 11 provides ’set it and forget it’ protection
July 15, 2008 – 2:56 pmOne company’s name springs to mind when it comes to antivirus products: Symantec.
Norton AntiVirus (NAV) is the 800-pound gorilla of anti virus software, on both the Mac and the PC, and NAV 11 proves that reputation is well deserved.
This version features a new, more straightforward interface, and a new Vulnerability Protection feature that scans files and images as you download them to ensure they aren’t packing viruses or malware.
While it’s true that Macs are relatively free of viruses, NAV also scans for Windows viruses, of which there are plenty, which means your Mac won’t accidentally pass along dangerous files to your Windows-using friends.
Previous versions of NAV were notorious resource hogs, and version 11 addresses that flaw.
Scanning my test Mac’s roughly 410,000 files had little to no impact on performance. Surfing the Web, checking e-mail, and listening to music with iTunes were as snappy as I’d expect on my 2.16GHz Core Duo MacBook Pro.
Despite the low impact on your system, there will come a time when you don’t want a scheduled scan to take place (perhaps you’re in the middle of editing a large video file), and that’s where the Snooze feature comes in.
Before a scheduled scan is set to run, a notification window appears that lets you delay (or snooze) the scan for anywhere from 15 minutes to a day.
NAV took more than three and a half hours to complete the initial scan of my 170GB of data. This is something to keep in mind, since NAV 11 is configured, out of the box, to scan all volumes that you mount on your Mac, including disk images, iPods, Time Capsule volumes, and removable media. You can easily exclude volumes from autoscanning (a good idea for Time Machine disks) or disable this feature altogether. During my testing the scanning didn’t interfere with using the attached volume, nor did it report any false positives.
Source:itbusiness.ca
