Norton Personal Firewall (NPF) 2001 is a hybrid package, combining firewall functionality with privacy controls, running under Windows 95, 98, 2000, and Me, as well as NT Workstation 4.0. At its heart, NPF is a rules-based interactive "learning" firewall, supporting both inbound and outbound filtering. The firewall itself will block ActiveX controls and Java applets, as well as more basic TCP/IP attacks, and has special built-in rules designed to block hack attacks from notorious programs such as the BackOrifice Trojan, or other intrusive spyware.

The big problem with firewalls is their unbelievable complexity--configuring one makes rocket science look easy. However, Symantec has gone a long way toward hiding all the complexities of a firewall behind a simple front end: users can simply choose between low, medium, or high levels of protection. But if you do want to tweak, you can still drill down to fine-tune NPFs security configuration. If you spend a lot of time online, sooner or later youll need firewall protection and Norton Personal Firewall is arguably the best on the market.

Competition between antivirus software vendors is particularly fierce but many publications rate Norton AntiVirus as one of the best. The best is even better with Norton AntiVirus 2001, which incorporates a number of significant new features and improvements, both in the accuracy of its detection capabilities and in its usability. The new SmartScan virus scanning engine, for example, is faster than its predecessor, though it can still take its time: tested on a P200 notebook it took 23 minutes to scan some 21,000 files. This sort of job can be scheduled to take place during the night, and time isnt a problem. By default, Norton AntiVirus is configured aggressively, with nearly all the scanning options enabled. For example, it has heuristics turned on by default and its manual scanner checks every file, not just files with specific extensions. Though these settings may increase the performance hit, they also provide more reliable protection. You can easily configure the program to scan only specific types of files, but most users are better served by trading off some performance for such thorough protection.

The key to successful virus detection is keeping your virus definition files up-to-date, hence the much appreciated revamping of the old LiveUpdate (LU) feature. Not only are update files much smaller in size, but LiveUpdate will automatically update all the Norton products installed on your PC in one go. If you have a permanent Internet connection, you can configure LU to update automatically, in the background. It can also be set to update whenever youre online. Theres now a worldwide network of LU servers, so updating should also be faster and smoother. And if the worst happens and you cant boot your PC because of a virus infection, you can actually boot from the Norton AntiVirus CD-ROM and clean it up from there--a neat trick.