OT: ZoneAlarm Bloatware

I had a similar problem with Trend Micro's Internet Security Suite. A couple of years ago I was using Norton AV but they increased their $20 subscription fee to something like $50 so I researched replacements. Trend Micro looked good and I bought a 3-license version for $50. I was really happy with it until they offered me a free upgrade to the 2007 version.

As soon as I installed it my system slowed to a crawl!! After a bit if digging I found a few "new" options I could turn off that made it almost as fast as the earlier version so I left it at that until renewal time. Then I found they had also upped their renewal fee but they increased to the same price as buying a new copy. Why would I want to stick with a program that I had to buy all over again once a year?!?!

I did a bit more research and switched to Avast Free which is free for noncommercial use and have been happy with it ever since! It doesn't slow my system down noticablly and it's caught quite a few trojans that tried to sneak in with emails.

Best Regards, Keith Marshall snipped-for-privacy@progressivelogic.com

"I'm not grown up enough to be so old!"

If you are behind a nat router you very likely do not need a firewall. I'm on a public ip (router) but my machines are on a network number range reserved for private networks. IOW, unless I make a connection out there is no way back in. For inbound stuff originating from the internet only certain ports are forwarded such as SSH and SMTP since I host services for both email and secure shell.

The only thing I consider usefull from a software firewall is reporting and blocking of applications that like to call home. I detest that sort of software and the presumptions of the company that wrote it. This is my PC not theirs.

If you are using XP, it does have a firewall in it and may be all you need. I don't have XP so I'm not very knowledgeable about it. Others will likely comment.

Wes

I had used the ZA firewall for several years. I did change over to System Mechanic Pro with their antivirus and firewall. I was unable to upgrade their firewall, and went back to ZA. Downloaded and installed their firewall and viruses checkers with no problems.

ZA came out with a new and improved "update" and everything went to do-do. I am on dial-up and the virus checker takes many minutes to update every time I long on, apparently reloads the entire database rather than simply downloading a delta file. For unknown reasons the transmission times gradually became longer and longer, and drops more common until every internet app was unusable. ZA now very poor about responding to technical support requests in my experience. In one way they are correct. If you can't log on the internet you won't get a virus or have your computer hacked...

Unka' George [George McDuffee] ============ Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), U.S. president. Letter, 17 March 1814.

Avast gets a big thumbs up from me ! I had Mcaffee security suite on my system , slowed everything to a crawl . Had to turn off the firewall , it was a total mess . Hammered 'em hard enough to get a full refund too .

"Errol Groff" wrote;

If it ain't broke....

Jon

The XP firewall is pretty lame, it doesn't block apps from phoning home (including trojans, if you get one), just pops up a dialog box that tells you something *is* phoning home. If you're not at the machine at the moment I suppose the box times out, dunno, but if it does then you have no easy evidence that things are happening.

John

At work we have a large gantry style robot that stacks semi truck tires until it gets a pallet full of the same type, then moves stacks to a conveyor to be put on a pallet. When the system goes down, workers have to hand stack these ~125lb tires. Our weekend crew consists of no engineers and mostly the lowest seniority maintenance workers. So, about midnight on a Friday night, our data processing employee decides to update the anti-virus software on the PC's that run the robot. .... And the thing quits working... They had to install a back-up hard drive that didn't have the antivirus software updates on it yet to get things running again. Like Jon said, "If it ain't broke....."

"Don't let IT get anywhere near it!" One weekend they decided to "Upgrade" a testbed computer from Windows 2.0. to Win 95. They reformatted the hard drive without backing up the test software, or even bothering to check to see that it would even run under Win 95. That product line was down for almost two weeks while the techs on the production floor dug up partial sets of backup disks, and repaired the files on the better ones to get it back on line.

next, they tried to tell us that we had to have their permission, and all paperwork from the publisher to install ANY software on the test floor. I wrote a lot of ATE software for in house use, so I went to the president of the company and filed a complaint.

The final straw? We had three old XT computers with EPROM programmers, and custom 8 bit ISA interface cards that they wanted to replace with pentium 133 MHz computers. They were told that if they touched anything else on the production floor, angry test techs would storm their office with flaming torches and pitchforks.

The final decision was that any non networked computer was off limits to IT, unless we requested specific help.

========== Apparently Zone Labs was sold in 2004 to a transnational corporation "Check Point Software" and the original developers and tech service people canned. Check Point's development centers are located in Israel and in Belarus.

More on ZA click on

I just tried the upgrade [32 meg download] to see if they had fixed the problems. When I attempted to install I got a message that the new version was not compatiable with IOLO's "system Mechanic pro" and that I should goto

Unka' George [George McDuffee] ============ Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), U.S. president. Letter, 17 March 1814.