Norton AntiVirus is best suited for newer systems with large amounts of available drive space and plenty of memory.

Software giant Symantec last month announced that it will add product activation technology to all of its consumer products, starting with Norton Antivirus 2004. The idea is to prevent large-scale piracy operations from thieves who counterfeit Symantec programs and offer them to customers on the Web. The company estimates at least 3.6 million bogus copies of its programs are sold annually.

Symantec Norton AntiVirus 2007 took second place in our "Virus Stoppers" roundup of eight stand-alone antivirus programs. Its overall virus detection rate of 96 percent places it firmly in the upper echelon, and like our other top-rated products, it sports an attractive and easy-to-use interface.

"The New Virus Fighters" roundup of antivirus products, Norton Antivirus 2006's good feature set and friendly interface earned the product an overall ranking of fifth place, despite unexceptional performance.

Transaction security safeguards you against online identitytheft Automatic backup and restore protects your important files from loss PC tuneup keeps your PC running at peak performance

On-going Protection keeps your computer protected from the latest Internet risks by automatically renewing your subscription at the regular subscription price (plus applicable tax), so you don't have to. For more information.

Delivers industry-leading protection in the background, so you can work and play without noticeable impact on performance.

Allows you to easily see software processes are running on their system and which ones are affecting the overall performance .

the antivirus protection is similar between Norton AntiVirus and Karspersky, we give the nod to Kaspersky again this year in part because of its superior user experience. Symantec, despite its efforts, still feels heavy, burdened by its own corporate legacy and dependency on other Symantec products. Also, it is not always clear what you are enabling or disabling, clever way to keep users from controlling the application themselves. And finally, watch out for fee-based "premium" help and technical support which once again finds its way back into the product.