Symantec antivirus products are well known by tech-heads as being resource hogging, life-sucking applications that should be avoided at all times for more efficient security applications,

Surprisingly, the Symantec promises to have heard all these customer complaints and taken them on board when creating the latest version of Norton Antivirus.

To begin with, the installation takes only two minutes – including driver installation, after which the program and definitions are updated. It requests a restart, but lets you delay it for up to 24 hours.

When idle, Norton uses only 5MB RAM, as confirmed by the built-in resource monitor and CPU usage monitor within the antivirus software. Scheduled scanning is gone too. In its place is a system that waits until it is idle for a predefined period of time before the program does anything, with the default set at 10 minutes. When the computer is used again, the scan pauses immediately.

In terms of the subscription service, it’s probably fair to say that the “pay once” format is dying in favour of a service-driven model. At AU$49.99 for up to three PCs, Norton remains good value.