Norton Security Premium 2019 – REVIEW

It’s that time of the year again. You know, where I get to test Symantec’s latest security offering. It isn’t all that different from last year’s offering. But I discovered in my Norton Security Premium 2019 review that there are some small differences that help make it a solid choice.

When putting Norton Security Premium through its paces, one of the things I quickly came to appreciate is that it stays out of the way as much as possible.

Windows 10 notifications are already a cluttered, poorly designed train-wreck, so fewer pop-ups are always going to be a good thing. Once installed, Norton Security just quietly did its thing, only alerting me when strictly necessary.

That I didn’t get bombarded with pop-ups consisting of dire warnings and/or irritating marketing offers was a welcome relief.

Other security software makers could learn a thing or two from this.

In a case of if it isn’t broke, so don’t fix it, the user interface hasn’t changed a lot. It gives you an at-a-glance view of the current security status of your PC/Mac. Ideally, it should say, ‘You Are Protected’ and be green.

Depending on which version you’ve stumped up the cash for, Premium allows users to install Norton Security Premium on up to 10 devices, which makes it ideal for multi-device households.

Lots of Buttons

Below the status bar sits a series of large clickable buttons labelled Security, Online Safety, Backup, and Performance. The interface reconfigures depending on which of these buttons you click, which greatly simplifies things and makes the whole experience a little less scary for novices.

Each button drops you into a specific section that fulfils a particular purpose. For instance, clicking Security gives you the option of running a security scan, updating things, and seeing previous security events.

All told, the interface is an elegant well thought out design that manages to be as straightforward as possible. While some security packages are designed for people with computer science degrees, anyone can get their heads around Norton Security Premium.

What Else is On Offer?

Interface aside, there’s a plethora of tools and utilities on offer. The Power Eraser tool deletes stuff that typically defeats other uninstall tools, while Insight helps Norton Security Premium choose which files should be monitored and scanned.

The Performance button provides access to PC maintenance tools as a hard drive optimizer, both cleanup and startup utilities, and performance reports. Having everything in one neat and tidy package is handy. That said, many similar performance tools can be had for free or come as basic Windows utilities.

The other bonus with Norton Security Premium is the nifty utilities it comes with. The ones I liked most are the Password Manager and generator. Both were intuitive to use and made a huge difference in my daily surf. Premium subscription also includes a cloud Backup utility, which comes with 25GB (you can purchase more).

Knowledge Shared

When it comes to detecting risks, Norton’s peer-to-peer tech means knowledge is shared between the entire global Norton Security user base. When combined with signature and heuristics detection, Norton Security Premium can accurately detect threats other security suits might otherwise struggle with.

This is reflected in benchmarking. A-V Test’s September and October testing showed Norton Security Premium scoring a 100 per cent against 0-day malware, while web and email threats in a larger malware test using 21,000 sample also saw it score 100 per cent.

One criticism previously levelled at Norton’s security offerings in the past was that its heavy-duty security chops came at a cost to system performance. To see if this had changed, I got a UHD MKV video file and converted it for viewing on my phone using the Handbrake video encoder. Without Norton installed, re-encoding took two hours and 45 minutes. After installing it, and re-booting, re-encoding times dropped to just over two-and-a-half hours. My take from this is that Norton is no longer the resource hog that it used to be

Norton Security Premium 2019 Review – Conclusion

So, what’s the verdict for my Norton Security Premium 2019 review? Norton Security Premium is sufficiently intuitive that I’d recommend it to my family and save a tonne of time on tech support related calls. It might not offer much that is new, but it delivers easy-to-use, rock-solid security, both of which makes it hard to go past.