Round like a record – Norton 360 rides again

Norton's 3.0 version of the 360 utility suite has given up the bloat and gained some speed.

Poor Norton 360. Symantec's flagship PC tune-up package has suffered from some ugly press in the past with critics slamming it as being bloated and slow.

To their credit, Symantec have however been beavering away to remedy these grips and appear to have finally cracked it with the latest version, release 3.0.

As well as the usual backup and tune utilities, Syamtec have added the latest internet security engine which is designed from the ground up to run quickly, and on the smell of an oily rag.

After installing the 360 kaboodle on my ageing Centrino notebook I was pleasantly surprised. Boot time didn't seem to slow any (in fact after running 360's smart startup manager it actually booted faster) and keeping a close eye on CPU activity revealed virtually no changes there either. After several weeks of having 360 in use, my notebook hums along and feels almost like a fresh Windows install.

Whilst I couldn't test Norton's virus/spyware scanners, I did manage to put its firewall to the test using sites such as https://www.grc.com, and http://www.auditmypc.com/.

All tests were passed with flying colours and my NAS drive and other shared folders worked seamlessly with the Norton firewall – there was no manual tweaking required.

Another particularly nice feature was the bundled browser plug-in which shows security ratings for website, making online shopping feel slightly less dodgy.

Norton 360 also comes with an improved backup application which now lets you create multiple backup sets, and specify which files to back-up by location and file-type.

Individual files can also be marked for backup. Also included is a year's access to 2 GB of online storage (for which you can add additional capacity for a small amount of cash), but with space to spare on my NAS, the backup worked like a trooper using local storage.

Nicest of all however is the fact that backups can be set to run when the computer is idle, avoiding the inevitable system slow-downs whilst the backup is underway.

360's PC Tune up component was similarly thorough, automatically clearing out crud and defragmenting my PC's hard drives. Perhaps the nicest feature of the tune up tools is the Smart Startup Manager.

Where other start-up manager apps let you enable/disable start-up items, Smart Start-up Manager goes one step further by watching the performance impact of programs that launch at start-up and run in the background, advising which items to disable. My PC's boot process was further sped up by deferring some application start-ups to run after a pre-defined delay.

Whilst uber geeks can roll their own security packages using an assortment of utilities, Norton's 360 is perfect for beginner through to intermediate users wanting a set of intuitive, useful and tightly integrated utilities to keep their PC in tip top shape.

Norton 360 3.0 RRP: $129