Zone Alarm

alanm · Mar 10, 2006

I'm using ZASS 6.1.737 successfully on XP, and 5.5.094 on Win2K.

There were a lot of problems with ZA* in the initial 6.* releases, but this latest one seems to have fixed them, at least if it's a fresh install and you have a reasonably vanilla installation (i.e. a new XP install).

BTW, I think they solved the annoyance of using it on a dev machine with a "changes frequently" flag that (I think) prevents it from asking about a binary every time it changes.

I had the latest McAfee product on a new Dell machine and it was a total pain in the butt, with errors, failure to connect to the web site for updates, confusing UI, failure to save settings, etc. I ended up uninstalling and replacing with ZASS, as I've done for the last few vScan major versions. Too bad, really - it used to be a good, fast product back around v4.x. Much like ZA, it got bloated and slow, though ZA isn't as bad

jimrockford · Mar 12, 2006

Quote from alanm:

I'm using ZASS 6.1.737 successfully on XP, and 5.5.094 on Win2K.

There were a lot of problems with ZA* in the initial 6.* releases, but this latest one seems to have fixed them, at least if it's a fresh install and you have a reasonably vanilla installation (i.e. a new XP install).

Alanm,

please clarify whether your positive comments about Zonealarm are based solely on your own experience, or have some statistical basis going beyond just one person. If the former, then I would stay away from ZA, because many people have always been able to use it without the disastrous problems experienced by so many other people over the past 6 months. One happy customer doesn't make it safe for other people to take the risk of wiping out their OS. Thanks for any comments you can offer.

alanm · Mar 13, 2006

Quote from jimrockford:
please clarify whether your positive comments about Zonealarm are based solely on your own experience, or have some statistical basis going beyond just one person.

Myself, and a few other people. No statistical significance.

However, I've used/followed the products for a long time, and experienced problems only when there was a surge of other people reporting problems (via the message board, at the first v6). As I said, the things that people that have always had problems seem to have in common are other security packages being present, XP firewall, existing spyware/viruses, etc. - things that one could expect to present problems. It's unfortunate that the company won't dedicate a person or two to work with people on their boards (like the IB folks here ) - they could solve problems for a large number of people at once versus one at a time.