On Windows PCs, Norton Security put in a near-perfect score of 298 out of 300, just a fraction behind the perfect score of Kaspersky Internet Security. For starters, if you're an individual, you don't really need to worry about the family-focused Premium and you'll probably want to stick with Standard, or Deluxe if you have more than one computer or handheld device. The best anti-virus software of 2015: revealedĪside from increasing the number of licences you can install Norton on (One, five and ten respectively), the increasing tiers also unlock extra features: some useful, some less so. There are several options available, called Standard (£30/year), Deluxe (£40/year) and Premium (£50/year). Instead of products released each year under a new name (2014, 2015 etc), you now just have a rolling subscription to a frequently-updated service. Regardless, this application isn’t going to turn your slow computer into a fast, powerful machine.Symantec has changed the way you can buy its Norton Security products. In fact, in previous years, the results were flipped for this program, with a 6 percent boost for word and data processing and a 3 percent decrease for graphics processing. Such trade-offs are common with system repair software gains made in one area can come at the expense of another. Norton Utilities improved graphics-processing performance by 6.15 percent, but word- and data-processing performance slowed by 2.73 percent after optimization.

The overall improvement to our test PC’s performance was merely 3.84 percent, which was a little below our category average and well below the best-performing applications in our comparison, Glary Utilities Pro and WinOptimizer. Finally, we evaluated how easy the interface was to use. We ran consistency tests to gauge each product’s trustworthiness, as it’s not uncommon for PC system utility software to bloat scan results, claiming to find errors that have already been fixed.

In addition, we timed increases in boot speed using BootRacer. We tested how much each PC cleaner’s optimization tools improved computer performance by using PCMark 10 to benchmark word and data processing, graphics processing, web-browsing speed and video chat quality.

Norton utilities 2016 review