Reviewed May 4, 2008 by Richard, Principal Editorial Staff Member on The Symantec-Norton.com Team Building on top of their market leading Antivirus and Internet Security programs, Symantec brings us Norton 360 Version 2.0. Additional functionality is provided, and your license provides for installing the product on up to three PCs within your home. Included is the invaluable protection provided by Norton Antivirus 2008, which consists in the ability to find and remove viruses, internet worms and spyware from email, instant messages, documents and applications downloaded to, or loaded onto, your computer. You benefit from automatic, regular updates to the software, and to the threat definitions. Also included is the additional protection from Norton Internet Security 2008 against hackers and unknown threats accessing and entering your computer, thanks to a powerful two-way firewall. Not only are suspicious programs blocked from accessing your computer, but if a suspicious process on your marchine tries to connect to the internet, it will only be allowed to do so with your authorization. You're guarded against identity theft, and websites you access are inspected to make sure they're not fakes. Norton 360 Version 2.0 completes the picture in terms of insuring that you don't lose the value of your computer. The added features are in two major areas - performance optimization and file backup. All too many of us have experienced the feeling that our computers are aging faster than we are. They start out all shiny and new. And they run like a sprinter. We browse the Internet, exchange emails, listen to music, store and exchange family photos, play CPU-hungry games and why, not, work. The computer becomes a valuable tool. Then we begin to notice that things aren't what they started out to be. Websites seem to take just a little longer to bring up. That picture of little Suzy looks like it's being painted on the screen by hand. Saving that memo you've been working on in Word takes so long you wonder if it's going to stall. Other than viruses and various forms of malware, this slowing of your computer's performance happens for two reasons - an accumulation of files that are really not needed any longer, and file fragmentation. Unneeded files can quickly accumulate from our habits of surfing the Internet but can also be created as temporary files by installations and processing. Unnecessary files use storage, but that's cheap today. More important is the impact they have on certain processes. Extra Internet files slow the processing of web browsers that go through them to see if something has already been downloaded to your hard drive before they retrieve them from the Internet. There can, and often are, thousands of these unneeded files. Even the fastest processor and hard disk can be impacted by the sheer volume. Fragmentation occurs as files are not written to the disk contiguously, but fragmented across the disk. When the disk is new, and a file is written to it, the file is written in one large block on the disk. When you access the file, retrieval is as fast as it can be. But then, some files are deleted. The operating system attempts to reuse the space, but sometimes the new files don't fit. So part of a file is written in one spot, part in another. Retrieving that fragmented file takes longer. Norton 360 Version 2.0 addresses both of these issues. Unneeded files are removed, and disk storage reorganized to speed data access. The difference is like taking age off your old friend. Now, file backup. Of course, you're already backing up all of your important files regularly and storing the most critical ones out of the house, right? Or maybe you're not as religious on that as you could be. Well, Norton 360 Version 2.0 could be your salvation. Regularly scheduled backups are facilitated and can be done to a separate disk or removable media, like a CD. Included with the standard license is up to 2 GB of online storage on Symantec's servers for your most sensitive files. Additional online storage can be purchased optionally. As critical as protecting against these threats are, users have sometimes been frustrated in doing so because it took time to run scans for them, or performance was hurt by securing against them, or backing up was a pain. Symantec has made a concentrated effort to improve performance and to make things easier. Scans run faster, a "Quick Scan" capability exists to run after regular threat definition updates, network monitoring is smooth and non-intrusive, performance optimization has itself been optimized, and backups are made as easy as possible. Having been refining the processes for many years, Symantec has installations and updates down right. Norton 360 Version 2.0 installs quickly and smoothly. Regular updates can be run automatically in the background (highly recommended), or triggered manually if you prefer to watch things happen. As a step up in the Symantec's security product line, Norton 360 Version 2.0 can provide for a good night's sleep knowing that you won't lose the value that your computer provides.