As of this week, the general public can test the beta versions of Norton Internet Security 2009 and Norton Antivirus 2009. The researchers from Symantec, the developer of the Norton range of security solutions, say that significant changes have been made to the software so that it can run faster without having to consume significant amounts of system resources.

Rowan Trollope, Senior Vice President of Consumer Products, explains, "Based on customer feedback, we viewed performance as the key feature for this release. The Norton 2009 products are designed to give users the award-winning security they count on, while ensuring their PCs run fast. Our goal is to create the fastest security product in the world, hands down".

As opposed to NIS 2006, the 2009 software version requires 300% less disk space. If NIS 2006 needed about 300MB of disk space to function properly, NIS 2009 only requires 100MB. How could such performance be achieved? The solution that Symantec has come up with is to eliminate some of the redundancies that made their way into the software year after year.

NAV 2009 takes less time to perform an antivirus scan because previously scanned files that do not change over time are flagged as "trusted files" and ignored on future scans; this feature was named Norton Insight. Media files such as music and movies do not change so there is no need to scan them over and over again. Users should be warned though that, a few days back, a multimedia infecting Trojan was detected in the wild.

I honestly doubt that NAV 2009 will be fooled by it, especially since the malware security database is updated every 15 minutes or so by a feature called Pulse Updates. The idea behind it is that instead of performing a big update over a longer period of time, the software will be able to provide better security by performing smaller updates, more often.

You can download the Beta version of Norton Antivirus 2009 here.
You can download the Beta version of Norton Internet Security 2009 here.