Symantec’s Norton products once had particularly bad reputations for being a resource-sapping, in-your-face hogs. The company has spent the past couple of years paying penance by reducing the load that new versions put on your system and the demands they place on your attention. It says that its 2011 editions are faster than both their predecessors and its competition, and that it’s reduced the number of alerts they’ll bother you with. They also snitch on other programs, via System Insight, a feature that monitors running applications and identifies ones which may be bogging you down.

As before, Norton uses community-based reputation–judging files in part by whether other Norton users have downloaded them without problems. Other new features include protection against dangerous downloads that works in a comprehensive range of browsers, IM clients, and e-mail programs; and the ability to manage other browser-based Norton services (Norton Online Backup and Norton Online Family) from within the Norton dashboard. And the Norton Bootable Recovery Tool now lets you easily prepare a CD-ROM, DVD, or USB drive to undo damage to computers so crippled by an attack that they can’t even start up.

Norton 2011 is available in two versions. Plain-jane AntiVirus 2011 costs $39.99 for a version that covers one PC for one year. Norton Internet Security, which adds a firewall, antispam, parental controls, identity protection, and other features, is $69.99 for up to three PCs.

Symantec is also touting several free security downloads it offers, including Power Eraser, which is designed to detect and remove “scareware” that’s often maddeningly difficult to shake, such as malware which poses as real antivirus software.

Trend Micro, meanwhile, has given its security products a new name: Titanium. More important, it’s given them a new approach: Instead of making you download signatures to your PC to detect viruses and other dangers, it’s put most of the detecting (including its own version of community-based file analysis) in the cloud and aimed to prevent dangerous files from ever reaching computers in the first place. The company says that this dramatically reduces required resources. (The software does include features to detect and fix problems that happen when you’re offline.)

As with Norton 2011, the goal may be to be unobtrusive, but there’s a lot of information and settings if you want them:

This cloud-based strategy, Trend says, is particularly effective against zero-day attacks–ones so new that security companies haven’t created and distributed fixes for them.

Trend’s basic package, Titanium Antivirus+, is $39.95 for one PC or $59.95 for three. Titanium Internet Security adds antispam, parental controls, and other features for $49.95 for one PC or $69.95 for three machines. And Titanium Maximum Security tops that off with 10GB of online backup, system optimization, a secure erase utility, and other features for $59.95 for one PC or $79.95 for three. Unlike Norton, Trend doesn’t include a firewall with any of its versions, choosing instead to integrate with the one built into Windows.

I’ve been trying both Norton and Titanium this week and found them better behaved than security products of the past, including both company’s own past efforts. But this article isn’t a review–the biggest question about any security package is still how well it protects you from threats, and I’m not in a position to judge that.

For what it’s worth, both companies have commissioned well-known third-party testing organizations to put their products through their paces. You probably won’t be shocked to learn that all the results make the products of the commissioning company look good.

Here, for instance, is Norton using benchmarks by AV-Test.org to show that NIS is the most effective malware fighter:

And here’s Trend Micro’s chart based on tests by NSS Labs that show it catching the most threats before they execute on a PC:

Of course, there’s nothing fundamentally conflicting about the two companies’ charts: They’re reporting on different tests, and neither company’s tests include the other one’s brand-new version. I’ll be curious to see what conclusions PCWorld, PCMag.com, and other independent sites come to when they compare these and other 2011 versions.

So what security software do you run, Windows users–and how happy (or unhappy) a camper are you?

The new version supports Macs as well as PCs for the first time. It can back up files even when they’re open and in use (a pretty basic feature that the previous iteration lacked) and it now keeps 90 days’ worth of old files so that you can roll back to a previous version if need be. You can now search for those old files as well as browse for them, can restore them to the original computer or any other system, and send them by e-mail.

As before, the service is as close to fully Web-based as possible: You do need to download a small app to your Windows PC or Mac. It runs in the background to shuttle data to or fro (and didn’t seem to be much of a drag on performance in my test drive). But managing backups, restores, and other aspects of the service is done in the browser, so it’s exactly the same experience in Windows and OS X. The new version has a cleaner, easier user interface.

At first blush, Norton Online Backup’s price of $49.99 a year for up to 25GB of storage sounds pricey, given that rivals Mozy and Carbonite offer unlimited storage for slightly more money. But Mozy and Carbonite’s pricing is per computer, one of the defining features of Symantec’s service is that’s for multiple-PC homes–its price covers up to five PCs and/or Macs. Additional storage is available, ranging from another $49.99 for an additional 10GB to $239.99 for 100GB. And the service is bundled into Symantec’s Norton 360 3.0 suite.

Given the extra cost to get sizable quantities of online space for multiple computers–not to mention the inherently slow process of backing data up across the Internet–I think it still makes sense to be selective about what you back up to a service such as Norton Online Backup. Send your irreplaceable files up to the cloud, but use something like a 500GB Seagate FreeAgent Go drive to protect everything else. (Portable hard drives may not be as simple and safe as online backup, but they’re faster–and they cost about a tenth of what you’ll pay for one year’s worth of the same amount of storage with Norton.)

Symantec is also soliciting tales of data-loss woe (and woe averted) for a competition it’s callling Norton Saved My Bacon. I mention it here mainly because the prizes include a year’s worth of bacon and bacon-flavored foodstuffs such as mints. (Vegetarians can opt for the cash equivalent.) I give ‘em points for creativity–even though I don’t like bacon.

I confess that I haven’t used any online backup service on a regular basis, in part because I have multiple PCs and Macs around the house.  So the new Norton is tempting. (Clarification: I have been using SugarSync lately, but not for anything close to comprehensive backup–just to sync a few folders I need on more than one machine.) Anyone out there want to share their experiences—good or bad–with any online backup service?

(Even UAC is surprisingly tolerable in W7: It’s amazing how much less aggravating it is when it doesn’t black out the screen and beep at you.)

I can’t give a verdict on Windows 7 until I’ve tried the final version, but I’m officially looking forward to it. But I’m also nervous that Microsoft will release a pleasing OS that gets messed up by the PC companies that use it. That’s because so much of the ugliness of the PC experience circa 2008 is caused by stuff that PC manufacturers pile onto the OS: icons that clutter up the desktop and System Tray, demoware that fills up the Start menu, and applications that bog down performance and waste your time.

(Check out this PC World feature from last year for some background on this scourge, including Test Center benchmarks that show that the junk robs you of some of the PC performance you paid for.)

Even utilities that serve no marketing purpose and theoretically improve on the basic Windows experience often degrade the OS. The last Lenovo and Toshiba notebooks I purchased both replaced the stock Windows Wi-Fi tool with their own networking utilities that layer on multiple levels of complexity for no clear purpose. (The Lenovo one tends to crash on me, too.)

In the past, Windows suffered from the broken windows effect–which traditionally refers to real windows in NYC housing projects, but hey, its name works perfectly in this case, too. The operating system itelf was so fundamentally disrespectful towards its users in so many ways that it wasn’t surprising that third-party applications picked up bad habits. (The reverse logic also works: Mac apps tend to be low-key good citizens, and that’s surely in part because OS X sets such a good example.)

I’d love to think that a more polite, less intrusive Windows will lead PC manufacturers to rethink their attitude. At last week’s PDC event, Microsoft said that it hoped PC manufacturers would rachet back the annoyingware on new PCs–but you gotta think that the company must tread carefully when telling companies how they can customize Windows given its past legal woes.

PC manufacturers presumably lard up their computers with extra stuff to add distinctive value to their systems (through apps that aren’t part of Windows itself) and squeeze more money out of their customers (through trialware and other marketing materials). These tactics are so pervasive that I’m not sure that many people in the industry realizes how self-destructive they are, and how much they could improve Windows by tampering less with it.

Here’s one tidbit that may be reason for optimism: Symantec, whose Norton Anti-Virus has long been the software equivalent of a potent medicine that tastes terrible, focuses on making its new Norton 2009 security products less of a system-sapping troublemaker.

Right now, the single biggest reason to choose a Mac over a PC is that OS X is simply far less of a hassle to use out of the box. Lots of folks are willing to pay a premium for the better experience. If Microsoft and PC manufacturers made a concerted effort, they could change the game pretty quickly. Windows 7 could be a sizable leap in the right direction, but I’ll remain a worried skeptic until Windows 7 machines start to ship…