Symantec releases public Norton 2009 betas

On Monday, Symantec opened two of its Norton 2009 products to public beta.

Both Norton Internet Security 2009 and Norton AntiVirus 2009 feature new code that not only makes the scans and services run faster, but consumes fewer system resources, said Tom Powledge, Symantec vice president of consumer product management.

As an example, Powledge said that, where Norton Internet Security 2006 consumed roughly 300MB of hard-disk space, the 2009 version is coming in at around 100MB. Symantec has achieved this, in part, by reducing a number of redundancies introduced over the years. For example, previous versions of Norton Internet Security contained multiple copies of the antivirus signature database.

For antivirus protection, a faster and lighter product has been achieved by focusing only on files that have changed. As hard drives fill with digital photos and songs — files that typically do not change — Norton is able to mark them as trusted and then ignore them on subsequent scans. Powledge said this results in big gains in speed, reducing the time taken to scan large drives.

Also, in order to keep up with the ever-changing malware on the internet today, the 2009 products with be updated roughly every 15 minutes with new signature files.

The public betas are available on the Symantec site. As with any beta software, users should make a full system backup first, and not run it on their main computer system.