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You need to have at least used a moderate variety of security products to get Norton solutions in perspective. NIS2006 does pretty much achieve what it sets out to do, which is to give average computer users a comprehensive package of protection and monitoring tools that are easy to understand and to use without needing any technical insight. Whether you like NIS2006 or not you have to respect it's effectiveness and particularly - it's reliability; A very strong point for Norton when compared against their main retail competition (Mcafee). Norton branding does seem to have acquired some rather uninformed contempt from a growing section of disenchanted users much in the way that Microsoft has, but such are the risks of becoming the establishment.

On the downside..... NIS2006 is unnecessarily large, intrusive (to the system rather than user) and often frustratingly slow! Microsoft operating systems (where NIS primarily resides) are already overladen, lumbering beasts, and the extra strain is clearly noticeable when products like NIS are installed. Too many processes, too much activity and too much resource usage, but maybe that's the price of such thorough protection? Well - not really - because there are alternatives that are equally or more effective and yet mere prancing bunnies compared to Norton's thundering heffalump!

A new and major irritation for 2006 is the Norton Protection Centre which sits in your taskbar or quicklaunch and basically tries to instill you with enough paranoia about potential threats that you will cough up further monies for additional and - readily promoted and available - Symantec products! This is a pretty transparent case of Symantec taking advantage of and abusing their customer's trust - which may well in fact lose them some loyal users - but it is easily disbabled (within Windows XP) by disabling the protection centre service. There's no reason why the relevant parts of that process couldn't have been integrated into the familiar Norton control centre (which can be launched from it's own existing taskbar icon). Other than that and the addition of a program learning mode (er... thanks, but no thanks) for the firewall, NIS2006 is virtually unchanged (at least outwardly) from it's predecessor. Whether that's to maintain customer familiarity or just to save Symantec the bother of a redesign...... who knows?..... or cares for that matter!

Installation is acceptably straightforward but can ocassionally turn ugly if things do go wrong, landing you with a partially-formed mess of disembodied files and processes that neither run properly or uninstall (complete NIS removal tools are available from Symantec's website but should be included with the software!!). It's also an easy enough product to live with if you're not too concerned about hammering every last ounce of performance out of your computer, and it's updated reassuringly frequently against newly discovered threats.

While NIS2006 is by no means 100% effective the Symantec website is a good place to start when an attack does make it through to your operating system. There are some truly terrible bolted on aspects to NIS2006 like the shoddy Antispam module (first seen in NIS2005) which enjoys branding and re-labelling your email messages, but like most individual features this can thankfully be deactivated.

I've allowed higher ratings for Customer Support and Website in tribute to Symantec's burgeoning database of threat knowledge and downloadable threat removal tools which not only serve Symantec customers but act as an invaluable resource for the whole Internet community.

Overall, Norton Internet Security 2006 is for the average PC user: sufficiently effective, reliable, good value and extremely easy to use. Norton's greatest advantage though is unfortunately still mainly within it's marketing and distribution. I can walk into a number of local shops (in Devon, UK) and buy a range of Norton branded products but wouldn't be presented with the option to choose between say: Norton Antivirus and Esets' NOD32 or between: NIS and Kaspersky Personal Security Suite security software. Ultimately that's all that gives it is place as the market leader. Clearly NIS is going to require much more aggressive development and streamlining to remain effective against increasingly more devious threats and against it's growing number of competitors making - quite frankly - superior but lesser known software.

Added: March 29th 2006

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NOTE: Product reviews are independently written by our members and do not necessarily express the opinions or views of CastleCops.