Anyone try 2013 Zonealarm?

[Dizzy]

I saw that Zonealarm is offering free firewall and antivirus in it's newest edition. Is it any good? Anyone running it and if so, what do you think?

[jbmcmillan]

I gave up on Zonealarm when Checkpoint took them over as soon after it began having connection problems.To be fair I haven't given them a look in years so I'm not familiar with their latest offerings.

[Odanez]

I just installed their free antivirus + firewall yesterday after being sick of antivir's new way of annoying the user.
So far so good I must say - if you have zone alarm firewall installed already, just install the fw+av and it will adopt all the settings you made in the old software.

[jbmcmillan]

Originally Posted by Odanez

I just installed their free antivirus + firewall yesterday after being sick of antivir's new way of annoying the user.
So far so good I must say - if you have zone alarm firewall installed already, just install the fw+av and it will adopt all the settings you made in the old software.

I just got rid of Avira as well same reason.Give us an update after a while as to how you like it.

[Odanez]

ok will do - I think I'm gonna go scan my system, try scanning network drives, check memory and cpu usage etc

Additional Comment:

Ok tested it a bit yesterday. Scanning network drives works fine. I also scanned a folder with over 1000 files, many of them executables - and the scan was done quite quick compared to avira. But memory usage was around 500MB while scanning, but maybe that's normal. CPU usage at about 22%.

On idle it uses less than 15MB of ram and just about no CPU. I think this is a keeper.

[sysigy]

I can't understand why people still bother with software firewalls.

If you're on Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 just use the built in firewall, it's perfectly suitable for 99% of home users, plus if you have a Firewall Router (which most people have these days) you don't even need a software firewall.

Firewall Router + Microsoft Security Essentials is more than suitable enough IMO.

[Odanez]

I need a software firewall even though my router has a hardware firewall already. There are some programs which I want to restrict access to the internet to, and the built in windows firewall only has very limited capabilities there. I can set up Zone Alarm so that everytime a new program is trying to access the internet or trusted zone, it asks me if I want to allow it, and then saves what I said for that certain application. It works really well, the windows firewall does not allow such flexibility.

Besides Zone Alarm has a built in Anti Virus and Malware detection - and it's easy on system resources, what more could one ask.

[sysigy]

I just set my hardware firewall to block everything outgoing and then I allow services one by one with their port ranges.

[python134r]

Originally Posted by sysigy

I can't understand why people still bother with software firewalls.

If you're on Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 just use the built in firewall, it's perfectly suitable for 99% of home users, plus if you have a Firewall Router (which most people have these days) you don't even need a software firewall.

Firewall Router + Microsoft Security Essentials is more than suitable enough IMO.

I agree that software firewalls are not needed for many anymore with current OS's and routers today. I gave up zonalarm years ago like 2001 or so. I think I was using Sygate back then.......hsrd to remember.