It's that time of year again when your Symantec security products start flashing at you for their annual update.  This time Symantec has not only tweaked the performance of the various products that make up its security suite, but has also endeavoured to give them a new look.

Wisely erring on the side of caution the changes to the interface are nothing dramatic so the old familiarity remains but with a new colour scheme and extended functionality. The whole aim of Norton Internet Security is to be a 'set and forget' package that almost anybody can install and have up and running in about 15 minutes.

It achieves that aim with a few minor exceptions where intuitiveness sometimes inexplicably goes out the door.

The suite is made up of the core Norton AntiVirus 2005 which comes with new internet worm protection that Symantec says is designed to block new types of fast spreading blended threats that take advantage of vulnerabilities in Windows.

As with the 2004 version it also includes protection against spyware. While the only time the average user is going to notice the enhanced protection is when a virus, worm, trojan or piece of spyware is detected and stopped, they will notice the benefits of new and enhanced scanning which is faster and does not slow down Windows boot up as much as earlier versions.

Norton Personal Firewall has come a long way since it was first introduced to the consumer market a few years ago. While even then it was one of the easiest firewalls to set up and use, the early versions were a pest compared to 2005 and constantly asked for you to set rules for obscure applications that needed to access the net.

Some of that still occurs, but you no longer need a degree in IT to work out what to do and in most cases NPF will automatically set rules for you. While Norton Personal Firewall is not going to protect you from a determined hacker
- after all, little will - it can give you peace of mind while doing your online banking or shopping and it will at least put a solid lock on the door to your PC.

Its big advantage is that it is self configuring, so you do not have to spend hours creating specific rules for it and it is simple to specify the information, such as bank account numbers, credit card details and email addresses you want to protect.

As with previous versions you can set up individual accounts for various family members with different levels of access, but the biggest improvement is the ability to specify exceptions to privacy rules.

In the past if you wanted to block your bank account number from going out over the web, NPF would even attempt to block it from your bank's website and you would be pestered with onscreen messages asking whether you wanted to override the rule.

With the 2005 version you can specify the websites where you want to be able to use the confidential information you have blocked from elsewhere, so you no longer have to put up with the permission requests. Behind the interface, NPF has also been given a few tweaks to improve its intrusion detection.

Last year Symantec added Norton AntiSpam to the product and it has proved to be one of the most effective spam killers on the market, with a pleasingly low false positive rate. It was easy to set up and within a few days had taught itself - with a little help from the user - what you considered spam and what was genuine email. It integrated well with Outlook and Outlook Express and was generally an impressive package.

The 2005 version goes a couple of steps further. It now also filters Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and MSN Mail for spam, automatically creating a separate spam folder in your account in the same way it creates a spam folder in Outlook or Outlook Express. NAS also now filters foreign language emails, but its here that the programs designers seem to have missed the point. You have to configure NAS to tell it what language emails you want to receive and it offers a choice of several dozen - however, by default it selects all of them and asks you to uncheck the ones you don't want, when
common sense would suggest that by default you should be able to just check the ones you want.

There is a way of doing it but it is not the first option offered.

You can buy each product individually. NAV and NPF retail for $99.95 each while NAS is $79.95. However, the Norton Internet Security package is a logical and common sense way to buy and as good as any home user suite on the market - and yes, it does work with Windows XP SP2.