Product: Norton SytemWorks 2001
Company: Symantec
Website: http://www.symantec.com
Estimated Street Price: $59.95
Review By: Julien JAY

Norton AntiVirus 2001

Norton AntiVirus 2001 has been enhanced compared to its previous release. The major new feature of Norton AntiVirus 2001 is the Automatic LiveUpdate feature (like in Microsoft Windows Me) that will automatically download, while you’re connected on the net, new set of viruses’ definitions files to keep your protection level up to date.

      

Automatic LiveUpdate
             

When you start Norton AntiVirus 2001 the first screen named ‘System Status’ will show a resume of the antivirus protection: email protection enabled, number of know virus, rescue set status and more.
     

     
Norton AntiVirus 2001 GUI
          

As with every previous version you can choose to activate the real time viruses analysis: when it’s enabled a small icon appears in the tray area of Windows indicating that all files you read on CD, floppies, ZIP, JAZ and more will be scanned to ensure it’s virus free. Norton AntiVirus 2001 obviously protects your email clients so you’re sure to not grab any viruses when reading email attachments: at least you can read emails with peace of mind. This feature has been streamlined and is now reliable, as it doesn’t crash a lot like it did before. You can choose for which email accounts you want to activate or not within the scanner: when the email scanning feature is on it’ll replace all your POP3 email servers by Norton AntiVirus specific ones so each time you’ll check your email, new messages will transit by it. While you’re checking mails a small, animated envelope icon appears in the tray letting you know that the emails will be checked. This feature works with the following email clients: Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Express, Eudora, Pegasus Mail, Netscape Mail & MSN Mail. But a new feature of this release is the protection for AOL & Hotmail users against viruses hidden in file attachments. However on our test system, Norton AntiVirus 2001 was unable to protect our AOL 6.0 email box. Standard disk analysis features are present in this release and you can easily do a manual virus checking on your primary hard drive! During the scan a nice new animation is shown making the lost time more fun. You can analyze folders, specific files or ZIP, JAZ, CD-ROM drives easily and schedule scans. This release of NAV 2001 now features a wizard that helps you create your own viruses’ checkups letting you define which drives you want to analyze. As always the reporting feature of NAV is complete and you each action of NAV can be logged so you know what happened. Unlike McAfee VirusScan 5, Norton AntiVirus 2001 still offers its users the ability to read the known viruses list without the need to connect on the net. NAV 2001 continues to feature the old good ‘BloodHound’ heuristic technology to recognize unknown viruses before they can create damage and the scanner can analyze compressed file content like Zip ones. The Quarantine tool is the same as in the previous release and allows you to move files that contain viruses into a safe place on your hard disk so you’re sure the infection won’t spread. If you suspect a file that is claimed virus free by NAV, to be contaminated by a virus you can submit it to the Symantec AntiVirus Research Center (SARC) using the online wizard: Symantec guarantees that its engineers will provide you a fix in a few days. Features of Antivirus software sometimes aren’t the best so we tested NAV 2001 with our set of viruses. Almost every virus was detected from IloveYou, Michael Angelo, to a conventional macro virus like Jakarta or Melissa as well as a DOS one JunkieBoot. The only virus that wasn’t detected is the Lovers email worm, which is really new and spread around the world in a few days. However we’re confident that the next NAV update will add this virus to the long list of known ones (more than 47900!).

If NAV detects a virus on your system, a clear and efficient wizard will guide you to choose which actions to do: quarantine, repair (if the file is a document) delete, etc. This wizard is really a good thing so novice users will know what to do! Note that if you’re afraid by the eventuality the repair tool can damage your Word document files you can first move them in the quarantine to ensure you’ve got a backup. We noticed one bad point with NAV 2001 (like every other competing antivirus software): when a virus has been replicated in the Windows Me protected and hidden restore folder this file can’t be erased, repaired or so since Windows Me totally blocks the access to it: it’s an annoying behavior that forces users to manually remove contaminated files that are in this folder using Windows 2000 or a DOS floppy disk.
            

 
NAV 2001 Virus Repair Wizard