IN THE PAST, Symantec’s Norton suite of programs have often been associated with being slow, clunky and classified by many as bloatware. With their 2008 suites however, they went back to the drawing board, looking at streamlining and simplifying the end-user’s experience. This resulted in a much simpler and faster overall end product, but there was still work to do. With Norton Internet Security 2009 however, I think they’ve finally won me over.

For this review, Norton Internet Security was installed on the family’s old PC running Windows XP SP3. Hardware wise, the PC was an Intel Pentium 4 3GHZ with 512mb of RAM.

Prior to NIS 2009, I too thought that Norton’s products were slow and rather confusing. I used other security suites including Windows Live OneCare of which was incredibly simple, and really was more of a ’set it and forget’ type of software. Automatic updates and tune-ups ran without any user interaction at all. As you may be aware, you should never run more than two anti-virus suites at the same time, so out went OneCare, and in came NIS 2009.

The first thing I noticed was that it was fast, installation was done in less than five minutes, no restart was required. Activation popped up, did it’s thing, I was in!

One of the new features in 2009 is Norton Insight which helps improve your computer’s performance. It maintains a white-list of files that can be excluded from scanning, which shortens scan times.

The user interface is more streamlined than previous versions. It gives you an at-a-glance view at what’s on, what’s not, and allows you to toggle them on or off without diving through configuration options.

Also introduced in NIS 2009 is an outstanding new feature dubbed Pulse updates. They’re updates that are downloaded every couple of minutes which ensure you really are up to date. As soon as an outbreak occurs, a patch is made, it’s sent out, and you’re protected without any interaction at all.

Overall, I think that Symantec can be quietly confident that they won’t be taking this year’s bloatware award.