Norton Protection Blog

A year ago we reached out to the gamer community at DreamHack in Sweden to find out what they wanted from their anti virus software and more specifically what they didn’t want. Their biggest request was for anti virus that didn’t use up precious PC resources.  They also asked for security software that wouldn’t interrupt them when they were gaming. Some of them even asked for anti virus that would automatically change its mode of operation to accommodate them appropriately when they were gaming versus when they were surfing. Of course we could have just walked down the hall and talked to some of the avid gamers that haunt our own halls…ah, yes, we did that too.

Fast forward one year.

We took the industry’s fastest and least resource intensive anti virus, skinned it and added a Gamer Mode to create our Norton AntiVirus 2009 Gaming Edition. In addition to suppressing alerts and notifications Gamer Mode also offers gamers the option to temporarily turn off additional real-time security processes so you can set your own balance of performance and protection when you are gaming. Gamer Mode kicks in automatically when you game in full screen mode on your PC or you can turn in on with a click on the Norton icon in your systray if you game in Windows mode.

Check out the tragic story of John4356783. It turns out our video production company has some hardcore gamers on staff too. We think it’s pretty funny.

This past weekend I was joined by an international group of journalists and bloggers for a Zero-Gravity flight to “blast off” the launch of the Norton 2009 security products. This 18-person “band of brothers” boarded the G-Force One in Las Vegas, prepared to float, flip and fly the way orbiting astronauts do. One word describes the experience - awesome. But most people want to know, what in the world does a Zero-G flight have to do with security software?

And the answer is simple…we designed the 2009 Norton products with a mantra of "zero-impact performance".  Meaning, we want our software to be weightless, nag-less, and virtually undetectable except when you really need it. To that end, we now proudly tout the fastest security products in the world, with over 300 performance improvements that span nearly every aspect of the product -- from the scanning engines to the user interface. The products install in under a minute, run scans in about 33 seconds, and boast the lowest memory usage in the industry (about 7MB).

Norton Internet Security 2009 is already getting rave reviews from the industry's best known experts – and now that they’re in the marketplace, we're excited to hear about your experience as well. Please leave me your comments in the section below. In the meantime, enjoy this short video from our trip.

Oh, and join us for the next flight in 2009.  Enter at: http://www.norton.com/space.