Norton 360 Offers Security Bundle Option For White Boxes

The Norton 360 suite includes a hefty 12 tools, but still performs most of its tasks discreetly and with a small processor footprint.

The 360 software is certainly less processor-intensive than the Norton Internet Security product. During initial testing, the 360 suite maintained a low profile, even after probing it with some simulated threats. Symantec can hide PCs from external probing when using the NMap utility.

The 360 suite arrives with a tuning utility that is intended to speed up PCs. But after applying the software's Tuneup step on a slow Hewlett-Packard notebook running Windows XP with SP2, engineers did not find any considerable difference in performance. However, the 360 software was able to clear out most of the temporary Internet files on the notebook.

Like ZoneAlarm, Norton 360 provides security and restricts access at the program level, not at the port level. The 360 suite's Transaction Security module also is less capable than advertised.

After running a spider and downloading some pages from a Web site's simple online shopping cart, engineers quickly created a fake site that had similar online shopping features. The 360 software was not able to determine that the site was a trap.

To further test this feature, engineers traversed through three anonymous search sites to access other sites. Here again, the 360 software failed to identify hidden proxy sites.

As part of the Norton add-on pack, users are able to block some porn sites and spam e-mails. However, the parental controls were too simple and its heuristics could easily be circumvented.

Symantec prices Norton 360 at $79.99 for up to three computers and provides a 60-day warranty.