Norton & McAfee

Security software head-to-head

Norton Internet Security 2002 & McAfee Internet Security 4 slug it out in the antivirus arena.

Price: £49.99

Manufacturer: Norton / McAfee

Ratings

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Kyle MacRae, What PC? 30 Jan 2002

You don't need us to tell you about the perils of internet-borne viruses and kudos-seeking hackers, but you do need protection. Here, then, are two comprehensive packages slugging it out in the security stakes. Unsurprisingly, the similarities between them vastly outweigh the differences.

Central to both are antivirus and firewall programs. Norton's AntiVirus and McAfee's VirusScan both scan for bugs in the background or on demand, kill infections and repair or quarantine suspicious files, include a year's free updates and are perfectly deserving of a home on any computer.

Points of difference? AntiVirus scans email on the way out as well as in, which is reassuring for your contacts as it reduces the danger of passing on an infection unawares; and VirusScan employs a feature called HAWK (that's Hostile Activity Watch Kernel, would you believe) which throws a wobbly if you - or more likely a Sircam-style virus - send the same message to lots of your contacts simultaneously.

Norton's version is easier to configure but, in a bizarre and frustrating hiccup, it mis-identified our installed copy of Microsoft's Encarta Dictionary as a virus and shoved the executable file straight into quarantine.

Firewalls generally take a bit of training and these two are no exception: each time a program tries to access the internet, up pops an alert message with the option to grant or deny it permission to do so once or forever. Thus your browser, email and instant messenger programs probably warrant online carte blanche, whereas creepy 'spyware' programs deserve to be stopped in their tracks.

The flipside to firewalls is their ability to mask your computer's presence on the internet in order to render it invisible to would-be hackers, and both programs worked just fine in our tests. Overall, we found McAfee's version the more intuitive, less fiddly firewall.

Privacy controls

So much for the important stuff. Elsewhere, both mini-suites attempt to woo your wallet with privacy controls, where attempts to send your name, address, phone number, credit card details or shoe size across the internet are supposedly blocked at source. We will remark only that such measures are ridiculously easy to circumvent, by accident or design.

Norton also includes parental controls in an attempt to censor surfing. Of this approach, we will say more: it really is high time that the notion of 'safe' and 'bad' URLs is knocked on the head. It's just a nonsense: the Page Three section of the Sun newspaper's website is blocked, for instance, but not so Richard Littlejohn; and even the most pornographic sites can be seen in all their glory simply by using search engine Google's cache.

At best, parental controls make kids look that little bit harder for forbidden fruit; at worst, it gives mums and dads an entirely false sense of security.

True to form, McAfee throws a few wholly unrelated extras into the melting pot, notably Shredder, which permanently deletes sensitive files, and Safe & Sound, a useful real-time backup utility. Both packages also block website banner ads, a feature for which dial-up users should be grateful.

Bottom line? Norton has the clear edge in design and overall ease of use. If you were designing an integrated internet security suite from scratch, it would look and feel a lot more like this than McAfee's version. Then again, McAfee's extra features could just tip the balance, and we found it less of a drain on system resources. Not surprisingly, they both cost the same.

If you already have an antivirus program that you're happy with, then think seriously before splashing out on either of these products. A firewall is a sound idea but Windows XP has one built in and the excellent ZoneAlarm (from www.zonelabs.com) is still free for personal use.

Specifications
Antivirus protection; firewall, privacy controls and blocking; free updates for one year.
Mcafee only: file shredder; encrypts key files; backup utility.
Norton only: parental controls.

Price
£49.99 (both products) inc VAT

Contacts
Network Associates (McAfee): 0800 092 7160 www.mcafee-at-home.com
Symantec (Norton): 020 7616 5600 www.symantec.com
www.zonelabs.com

Overall
McAfee Internet Security 4: **** Norton Internet Security 2002: *****

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