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Norman Virus Control Editorial Review & User Reviews

Norman Virus Control (NVC) is one of our most highly recommended anti-virus software products! Read our independent editorial reviews and user reviews to find out why!

Norman Virus Control Plus Review

Star Ratings: Virus Detection: Added features: Ease of Installation: Ease of Use: Technical Support Value for Money: Overall: Average User Review: No reviews

Cost to buy:

• $53.00 (1 year license)
  

Features of Norman Virus Control:

• Industrial strength virus detection - independently verified 100% detection rate by VIRUS BULLETIN
  
• Winner of PC Magazine's Editor's Choice Award
  
• Email and newsgroup scanning:
  Norman Virus Contrrol (NVC) scans all in- and outgoing emails as well as postings to and from newsgroups to ensure that they do not contain malware of any kind. In addition, attachments can be blocked based on file extension or specific file name to further increase security. The email scanning feature works with most email programs currently available. NIP hooks all applications using winsock, and scans all traffic on ports for POP3, SMTP and NNTP. Norman Internet Protection (NIP) minimizes the threat from both new and existing email worms with both the best in virus scanning and plain attachment blocking. We recommended that Norman's SandBox is enabled to increase protection against known and unknown malware.
  
• Norman SandBox:
  Norman's SandBox technology detects new and unknown computer viruses, including trojans and worms. Today, an email worm can infect tens of thousands of workstations in a matter of seconds. The antivirus vendors are expected to find the cure, update the virus definition files, and distribute these to its customers immediately. The need for speed is paramount. Norman's SandBox is a virtual world where everything is simulated. An emulator provides an environment where possible virus infected executables "run" just as they would do on a real system. When execution stops, the SandBox is analyzed for changes. The SandBox is particularly tuned to find new email-, network- and peer-to-peer worms.
  
• Real-time scanning:
  On-access scanning involves constant monitoring of the file system on the workstations. For antivirus software, it is imperative to detect and block a computer virus before it is activated. Whenever a file is accessed in a read/write operation, or a program is executed, the on-access scanner is notified and scans the file automatically. If a computer virus is found the following options are available: 

  • clean
  • remove
  • warn only
  • ignore
    
• On-demand scanner:
  This scanner is used for manual scans of selected areas on a machine. Entire drive(s) can be selected for scanning, or just certain folders and subfolders - even specific files. For example, any object in Windows Explorer can be selected and scanned by right-clicking the mouse button and selecting Norman Virus Control from the menu. Tasks can be executed immediately, or scheduled for execution later, for example at fixed intervals. The On-demand scanner can use Norman's SandBox technology to further enhance virus protection by detecting unknown malware before it can cause harm.
  
• Automatic updates:
  Norman Internet Update (NIU) is an integrated part of NVC and can be configured to regularly check for new and updated files on Norman's product servers. NIU provides complete updating and upgrading of the application software and virus definition files to ensure that the latest version of the software is always installed. NIU employs incremental updates of virus definition files to keep the size of the updates as small as possible, thereby reducing download time.
  
• Task editor:
  With the Task editor you can create task files for scans that need to be performed on a regular basis, or special scans that need to be run in certain situations. For example, if files are downloaded from the Internet to designated areas, a task file can be created to scan these areas only, or run manually by the user after downloads have completed. In addition, the task can be scheduled to run at a pre-defined time.
  
• Utilities:
  Certain elements can be changed by selecting some of the entries, for example Task files. You can also manually delete, restore or save files that are placed in the quarantine from the Utilities module.
  
• Decompression library:
  A new advanced decompression module has been developed to scan files that have been compressed with different archive programs. With this module NVC can now scan more than 30 archive types and variants like ZIP, TAR, RAR, ARJ, UUENCODE, PAK, ARC JZ etc. Files that contain other files of different archive formats will also be scanned to further increase security. In addition, if malware is found within an archived file, NVC will - if possible - clean the infection and repack the file (only valid for some formats).

Minimum Requirements:

• Any Pentium class PC running Windows 95/98/Me or Windows NT/2000//XP.
• For Windows 95 Internet Explorer version 4.0 or later is required.
• For Windows NT Service Pack 4 or later is required.
• For Linux i386 or compatible architecture, glibc 2.2 or better, and Java 1.4 for configuration

Languages Supported:

• English
• Norwegian
• Dutch
• German
• Danish
• Swedish
• Finnish
• Czech
• French
• Spanish
• Italian
• Portuguese
• Polish
• Slovenian
• Chinese Simplified
• Chinese Traditional

Editor's Verdict:

Norman Virus Control (NVC) is a well known virus checker and is widely used by many corporations around the world. It also comes pre-installed in many new computers. NVC for the home uses much the same technology as its corporate counterpart, with perhaps the exception of any support for networks.

Norman's Virus Scan makes it fairly high up our top 10 list of antivirus software primarily because of its excellent record of effective virus protection. The Norman Virus Control product line has consistently passed the Virus Bulletin's independent tests with a better record than many other antivirus software manufacturers, including McAfee or Norton for instance. It also passes ICSA and West Coast Labs level 1 & 2 independent testing, so the virus detection engine within NVC is unquestionably one of the best there is. NVC offers protection for all known viruses using its virus definition files which are updated daily by being automatically downloaded and installed onto your system. It also offers protection from as-yet unidentified viruses using its heuristic engine to detect virus-like behaviour.

Norman Virus Control uses an advanced virtual "sandbox" environment for catching new viruses and worms. Including both workstation and server-specific features, Virus Control offers generous options. But with its multimodule interface and sometimes jargony help system, it is not perhaps the best choice for home users who want to "set and forget" their antivirus software. Virus Control's sandbox technology fakes viruses into trying to wreak havoc within a safe, isolated virtual Windows environment - while this environment is isolated so that the viruses can do no harm to your system, it does allow the software to detect and quarantine any programs that display virus-like behaviour. While other companies also use virtual machine technology to ferret out polymorphic and other viruses, Norman claims that its sandbox is richer, including network, Web, and e-mail simulation to catch e-mail and network threats.

Norman Virus Control is fairly easy to install and has a multitude of features that you can set, making this software highly configurable. However, it is not particularly user friendly and may not appeal to those users who are not particularly technically minded. The Norman Virus Control software has no central control panel as such, from where you can access all the components and features of the software - instead it has a number of different modules which you must access seperately depending on the task you want to perform. For instance, you must use the configuration editor to set the basic functions of your virus checker, whereas you must use the task editor to schedule virus-checking tasks to run at any particular date or time. This, it seems, is because Norman Virus Control is actually made up of several independent programs, each of which has its own control panel.

Norman offer fast and friendly technical support, either by e-mail or by phone, and you can also check out the online forum, where you'll most likely find an answer to your question. The software also sports a very useful context-sensitive help system, which gives you help specific to the area of the software you're looking at.

Norman scans all incoming and out-going e-mails, and despite what some other reviews on the internet say, it also supports a multitude of archive formats, scanning for viruses in ZIP-files and all sorts of other archived formats.

In summary, Norman Virus Control has a superb record of virus protection as indicated by several independent tests. It also has a multitude of features to protect, scan and disinfect all parts of your machine (see above for the complete list). Norman is a welcome addition to our top 10 list but fails to get into our top 5 because of it's less than perfect user interface and it's relatively high price tag compared with other antivirus software packages. For our money, you can't do better than our No. 1 choice, Panda's Titanium Antivirus software, but Norman will also provide you with complete piece of mind, knowing that your computer is being protected 24/7. Click on the following button to check out the manufacturer's description and order your copy of Norman Virus Control today...

Norman Virus Control - Screenshots

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