Norton Internet Security(NIS) 2012 – A Worthy Upgrade

Posted 135 days ago No Comments by Jason S

I have reviewed several of the Norton products over the years and as you might have observed – the products have simply become that much more easy to use and great value for money. Norton Internet Security( or NIS as we call it) 2012 is no different. I have NIS 2012 edition running on my laptop for the last week. The upgrade process from NIS 2011 was so very painless – that’s why I call most of the Norton stuff are so easy to use. If your 2011 license has not yet expired, NIS 2011 can upgrade itself to 2012 over the wire for free. Of course you need to purchase a new license to extend the expiration date.

I have’nt noticed any system slowdown with NIS 2010, 2011 and it’s no differenet with NIS 2012 and have been virus free for years(touch wood). Over the past couple of months, I have tried about all the newest Anti-Virus’s there are like McAfee and Trend Micro, imaging back to a clean install before trying another. I also run the full versions of Malwarebytes & Prevx. And as a backup ‘Hitman Pro’. But NIS 2012 has been simply superb and shines out of the crowd. I would say Symantec was a little late in releasing the 2012 security suite when compared to the others who had it out atleast 3-4 weeks earlier.

Coming to the new features in 2012 – The way I see it – NIS 2011 edition was wonderful, and perhaps as a result of that the 2012 release is more about building on that, than providing anything radically new. But there’s quite a lot of enhancements to look out for and which make it a worthy upgrade.

Starting off with my favorite – SONAR (Symantec’s behavioural monitoring technology) has improved way better to detect malicious programs. We now have a new management tool that allows users to remotely check the security status of computers running Internet Security 2012, apply fixes, change settings and much more – you did read me right REMOTELY!! There are also the usual interface tweaks which at the end of the day make NIS 2012 much easier to manage than ever.

Next in list is the much improved and very impressive spam filter. What was so interesting was that the spam filter installed and configured itself automatically, didn’t ask me a zillion questions or next..next..next involved. What I’ve noticed in the last 1 week is that its accuracy proved better than some commercial products that I have been using. The spam filter could correctly blocking 92 percent of my test junk mails, and btw only misidentifying two legitimate emails as spam. One of them had a commercial advertising message from a PR agaency though.

NIS 2012 also has the Insight technology which maintains a “reputation” score for your computer’s files to help you decide which can be trusted, and which really can’t – this is very useful while downloading files off the internet and executing it. You can easily see the results for yourself by running a reputation scan, which lists your computer’s files and whether they’re trusted, or commonly used, very handy if you think you may be infected by something and are looking for clues to identify the malware.

NIS 2012 has a Performance module, which tracks resource use on your PC, alerts you to problems, and can help to optimise your system speeds. I had quite a few alerts while using Photoshop extensively which surely is a resource hog. So the occasional pop-ups that come up warn that a particular application is using a lot of RAM, or maybe monopolizing your hard drive, or whatever the issue might be – this is very useful since you will already experience your PC running slowly or on the verge of getting hung and you get this alert to con firm the same.

I would strongly recommend NIS 2012 if you want an accurate antivirus, an intelligent firewall, a very reliable spam filter, and finally some good browsing protection. There are quite a lot of extras like the Identity Safe password manager and performance module which I think are the bells and whistles added but any day could make up as a stand-alone utility too.