Microsoft is not the sole provider of security solutions choosing to focus on a bare-bone, core anti-malware protection optimized to use just a fraction of the hardware resources available. While the Redmond company's Morro free antivirus is at least half a year away, Symantec has already released a flavor of Norton AntiVirus 2009.

However, the motivations of the two companies are completely different. While Microsoft is targeting the 60% of Windows users that have yet to deploy a security solution, tailoring Morro to emerging markets, Symantec is delivering a solution aimed at the gaming community, namely Norton AntiVirus 2009 Gaming Edition.

“Gamers are an extremely demanding audience that simply won’t tolerate anything on their system that detracts from gameplay,” explained Rowan Trollope, senior vice president, Consumer Products, Symantec.

“Norton AntiVirus Gaming Edition keeps gamers protected online, and runs perfectly undetected in the background, meaning no interruptions, no pop-ups, and with the same award winning zero-impact performance of our 2009 products.”

According to Symantec, Norton AntiVirus 2009 Gaming Edition will consume under 6 MB of system memory, while it is designed to take just under 50 MB of the disk space. At the same time, Symantec claims that the security solution has been optimized to not impact the boot time and the functionality of the operating system in the least.

For $39.99, the price of a one-year subscription, gamers will receive a security solution guaranteed to keep the level of nagging and interference at a minimum.

“New Gamer Mode keeps you protected but won’t bother you while you’re in the middle of a game. Suspends updates, alerts, and other background activities, and is automatically enabled when system is in full screen mode, or easily manually enabled. Smart scheduling holds resource intensive actions such as system scans for when the computer is idle,” Symanted stated.

Norton AntiVirus 2009 Gaming Edition is available for download here.