Late last month I’ve given out 100 license for BitDefender Internet Security 2010 to subscribers and there are 5 more winners that has yet to claim their prize. I’ve used a different email address to contact them hopefully it won’t go into their spam/junk folder. Just one day after the BIS 2010 giveaway, a kind person by the name of BB-Style from Germany sponsored 55 Norton Antivirus 2010 genuine license keys valid 366 days worth $2197.25 for the next giveaway!

I knew that the Norton 2010 products should be released somewhere around September based on previous versions release dates and I thought of only giving out the 55 NAV 2010 licenses after I get back from my honeymoon. After discussing with my wife, we both think that it’d be better to give it away before I leave since I will be gone for a month! Even when I am back, I probably won’t have time for this blog yet since I have to deal with many pending issues.

I’ve given a quick test on Norton Antivirus 2010 and I was IMPRESSED by the performance and also the intelligent virus detection. As usual, to be eligible for the lucky draw, all you need to do is subscribe to my daily article and write a comment at the end of this article. The lucky winner will be randomly picked and announced at tomorrow’s article.


Norton AntiVirus 2010, developed and distributed by Symantec Corporation, provides malware prevention and removal during a subscription period. It uses signatures and heuristics to identify viruses. Other features include e-mail spam filtering and phishing protection.

Here are the new features in Norton Antivirus 2010 which are not found in older versions of NAV:

Norton Insight Network

Norton Download Insight

Norton File Insight

Norton Threat Insight

SONAR 2 Behavioral Protection

Norton System Insight

The speed of scanning is very fast. I did a full scan on a clean Windows 7 Ultimate installation and the first time took 568 seconds (9 minutes 46 seconds) to complete the full scan on 65472 items. When I ran the full scan again for the second time, it only took 328 seconds (5 minutes 46 seconds) to scan 64578 items. The amount of items and time takes to scan has decreased because the number of trusted and skipped files has increased.

Next I tested Norton Antivirus 2010 against 23 current virus, worms and trojans that are circulating around the Internet. I turned off Antivirus Auto-Protect, dropped all the virus, trojans and worms into desktop and scan it. There seems to be a bug on the manual scan because it took 254 seconds to scan and “process” all 23 files. 20 out of 23 has been automatically quarantined. The 3 virus that was missed by NAV 2010 is the private trojan, an autorun.inf file and a trojan downloader which is created by Sality worm. When I tried to run the private trojan and trojan downloader created by Sality worm, a few seconds later SONAR detected security risk which blocked the file preventing from being ran and deleted it. As for the autorun.inf, it is pretty much harmless because it is pointing to a file that does not exist. All I can say about the SONAR II is its really impressive. It also checks how many users in the Norton Community have used this file.

If you open Windows Task Manager, you can only find ccSvcHst.exe that takes up around 10MB+ of memory. But when I used Process Explorer to view the running process, there are actually two ccSvcHst.exe process.
The memory usage for one of the process can get really high during scanning but after a while Norton would intelligently clear off the memory usage, dropping it to merely less than 10MB for both process.

Norton Antivirus 2010 is DEFINITELY BETTER than 2009 because of the SONAR II. Norton Antivirus 2010 runs on Windows XP (32-bit), Windows Vista (32-bit and 64-bit) and Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit). The system requirements are 300 MHz or faster processor, 256 MB of RAM (512 MB RAM required for Recovery Tool) and 200 MB of available hard disk space.

For those that already have a valid license for previous versions of Norton Antivirus, you can update to the latest Norton Antivirus 2010 for free. Visit the Norton Update Center, click the “Update Me Now” button download the AutoSetupPkg.exe to update your NAV to the latest v2010. There are times when this tool will wrongly detect that you are using the latest version when you have an old version. If that happens on you, click the “Choose My Product Manually” link to manually download NAV 2010.