NORTON ANTIVIRUS 2004 PROFESSIONAL EDITION

Symantec, the company behind Norton, has an enormous presence and feels the need to offer an extensive range of products to tackle the curse of viruses. In total we counted 27 antivirus and security products on its website, but intriguingly there's no package aimed specifically at the mobile market, unless you count Antivirus for Palm OS.

Norton Antivirus 2004 Professional Edition is a mainstream package, yet it costs a steep £55 (inc VAT), and you pay the same price for a download from Symantec's online store as you do for the full retail package. The Professional version carries a £10 premium over the basic Norton Antivirus 2004, and that gets you a couple of interesting features.

The software can detect and counter Worms and hostile Scripts, before they're specifically flagged up by virus updates. This approach is called either 'holistic' or 'heuristic' - depending on which software house you speak to - it means that the software keeps an eye out for suspicious activity. It's like the police asking for a word after observing something that may, or may not, be a criminal act.

The second feature is Data Recovery to protect files from accidental recovery. It's highly debateable whether that is a task for antivirus software, or not.

We'd be far happier if such professional features were rolled up into the basic version. Symantec states that its 2004 antivirus software monitors compressed archives, but there is a note that this feature only works in Windows 2000 and XP, and not under 9x and Me.

Naturally the software scans incoming and outgoing email, and it also monitors traffic over AOL, MSN and Yahoo Messengers. Installing Norton Antivirus 2004 Professional Edition is simple, as you would expect. The preliminary scan detected two of the four test files that we used to infect our test laptop, but at first the zipped test files escaped detection.

After installation we configured the software to run LiveUpdate, to schedule a weekly scan every Friday night, to monitor compressed files in Real Time and then to run a full scan. That caught all four test viruses, but we would expect nothing less.

This is an extensive software package but it doesn't specifically check for threats when you synchronise a PDA, and it costs plenty. Also, on past experience, you can expect to have to download large updates on a regular basis.

RATING: 6

PRICE: £47/£55 (EX/INC. VAT) - DOWNLOAD OR PACKAGE
KEY FEATURES: ANTI VIRUS SOFTWARE FOR WINDOWS 98/ME/2000/XP
CONTACT: 020 7616 5600 WWW.SYMANTEC.COM