The research for this comparison was done by installing these software suites on an already infected laptop and a clean, new, uninfected desktop. The laptop is running Vista Home Premium and the desktop is running Windows XP Pro Media Center Edition. The systems were connected to a cisco-powered wireless-n router with enabled WEP2 encryption.

All of these programs has basically the same feature set; protection against viruses, spam, intrusion, phishing, rootkits parental control, firewalls and 3-user installs. There are some very important noteable differences however. These software suites are all-in-one packages meant for personal and family usage. With that being said, Norton Internet Security Suite 2008, has a great feature set and a clean interface, an was the quickest of the packages we compared to catch and prevent a remote hack attempt through the wireless router. Symantec's product was also able to handle the preinfected system well. However Symantec's Norton Internet Security Suite does have a few seriously bothersome features; it does NOT want to be uninstalled, it DOES want to constantly remind you of things, menus for turning these reminders off are not easily found, and it was the largest system hog of the group we compared.

McAfee's Internet Security Suite 2008 was the most transparent of the round-up. The system monitor show low resource usage even during full system scans, especially on the Vista-based laptop. McAfee was also able to detect and remove the notorious Sony rootkit that was placed on several of Sony's music CDs. Norton however allowed me to install the rootkit, this may have been because of the operating system's upper shell usage of Media Center. Norton's AV did detect the rootkit AFTER it was installed and I FORCED it to scan. The worrisome part is that it may not have found it until the next scheduled system scan. McAfee's Backup and Restore fuctions were clean and comprehensive although a bit slow. This is not Backup software, it is however a good overall protection package and is intuitive.

ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite, former 2006 big award winner, has unfortunately suffered the most. ZoneAlarm was able to block, catch, and prohibit all of the online threats I could find. The testing was done with Mozilla's FireFox 2.0 and the latest version of Internet Explorer. The complications came when IE (Internet Explorer) and ZoneAlarm both identified threats at the same time. There were warnings all over the screen, blocked images, security banners, flashing system tray icons, and even a center-screen pop-up from ZoneAlarm. The ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite is somewhat unbalanced as more attention was placed on the online aspect of system protection. The woes continue with this programs two-way Firewall which Vista's UAC (User Account Control) did NOT like, at all. Unless you were signed on as the Administrator, ZoneAlarm's software and Vista would bump heads for control and permission to transmit certain types of data that ZoneAlarm believed to be spyware transmitting backward, which were really small chunks of data such as wordpad text files, and MIDI controller information. Lastly the identity theft feature requires the entry of some very, very personal information, such as credit card number, license plate numbers and more so that it can presumably notify you if this information is found somewhere online. This might be acceptable to some users, and should only be used on a new or totally clean system, fortunately this is an optional, not required module inside ZoneAlarm's suite.

In terms of catching viruses, McAfee and Norton did the best job for both pre-existing threats and threats we tried to install. ZoneAlarm's suite was able to filter out the most spam correctly, and all of the software packages sent good mail into the spam category, until they "learned" not to.

In considering what software to buy for protection, you must first think of your computer habits. If you have several people using your computer for internet browsing the overprotective ZoneAlarm suite might be a good choice. For the average to power user, the Norton and McAfee Internet Security Suites provide good, well-rounded security, and function without paranoia on networked systems. If you need your computing power and want nearly invisible protection, McAfee is the best of this group, and works well with Vista and XP's own protection protocols. All packages here come with a 1-year subscription, and automatically updated themselves (some even twice per day).