Symantec continues to dominate competition with sweep of PC World best buy honours

Symantec today announced that four of its market-leading Norton products - Norton SystemWorks 2000, Norton AntiVirus 2000, Norton Utilities 2000, and Norton CleanSweep 2000 - swept the annual PC World Best Buy honours published in the February 2000 edition of the top-selling magazine. The PC World honours, along with the more than 60 additional industry awards the company earned during the third fiscal 2000 quarter alone, underscore Symantec's continuing dominance in the consumer product market.

"The strong performance of Symantec's entire Norton product line is the result of our commitment to understanding customers and delivering innovative solutions that make a difference for consumers and small businesses," says Jako Voges, marketing manager for Symantec's Africa and Middle East region. "It is gratifying to receive world-class recognition from PC World, one of the industry's most respected publications - these awards are further testament to the fact that Symantec leads the way in Internet security and problem-solving solutions."

After extensive comparisons of features, price, ease of use, and efficacy, editors picked Best Buys in each of four utilities categories: suites, anti-virus solutions, diagnostics tools, and uninstallers. According to PC World editors, "Symantec's Norton products dominated the field, largely because of their stability, usefulness, and commendable customer support."

Norton SystemWorks 2000 is the latest version of the Symantec's consistently superior utilities suite. Since its introduction in November 1998, Norton SystemWorks has continued to outperform all competitors in independent lab tests, product comparisons, and software reviews. In addition to being named PC World Best Buy, Norton SystemWorks has been recognised as PC Magazine Editors' Choice in May 1999 and ZDNet's Editor's Pick. PC World editors concluded their exhaustive utilities review, "[Your] best bet is a suite like Norton SystemWorks 2000, which provides a fairly priced and eminently useful set of tools--enough to cover you in almost any situation."

For the third straight year, Norton AntiVirus 2000 earned PC World's prestigious Best Buy "thanks to comprehensive protection, innovative features, ease of use, and excellent support," according to editors. Joe Wells of Wells Research tested the ability of each of the eight anti-virus products to detect 51 wild boot viruses and 194 wild file and macro viruses; to remove a sample virus received as an e-mail attachment; and to remove the 20 most commonly reported wild viruses as listed in the September 1999 WildList from Wells Research. Only Norton AntiVirus 2000 earned a perfect score.

Norton Utilities 2000 earned its designation as Best Buy diagnostics utilities because of its effective system analysis, repair, and preventive maintenance. "Symantec's Norton Utilities 2000 is the latest in a long line of versions stretching back to pre-Windows days . . . it includes many finely tuned extras," PC World editors wrote. "Norton Utilities' ease of use and excellent selection of features make it our Best Buy."

After careful testing and analysis, PC World editors awarded Norton CleanSweep 2000 Best Buy honours "because of its cleaner look and feel, coupled with a well-designed interface that makes the program a snap to use - even for first-time computer users . . . Norton CleanSweep 2000 safely removes unwanted applications and space-robbing files."