zone alarm

Hi All,

Another dummy question:

A few months ago i installed zone alarm. It was very confusing always asking if i wanted to allow a things to run. So i uninstalled it and got Live one care
(mistake) I would like to get Zone alarm again but my question is this. How do you know if you should allow something or not? Most of what it asked i had no idea what it was and didn't know wether to say yes or no. Is there something a little more friendly to the dummy?
Thanks for any help,
Dan

 

>> How do you know if you should allow something or not? Most of what it asked I had no idea what it was and didn't know whether to say yes or no. Is there something a little more friendly to the dummy? Thanks for any help, Dan <<

ZoneLabs has for many years now; maintained an outstanding and well moderated onsite forum support they take all-comers for Pro questions and even for the ZoneAlarm free version. If I were you I'd try their forum (as well as Major Geeks) for qualified answers to your current dilemma.

You can find the forum by Googling the exact terms: Zone Labs User Forum and then choose the first search result. There's lots of 'qualified' help available there.

Side Note: I'm a Windows XP user and I'm currently testing the Look 'n' Stop firewall which is not free; unfortunately, but I'm impressed with is so far. Look 'n' Stop has a much easier-to-read user interface, it is very configurable, uses almost no resources and I have also noticed that it does not "bother me" with the endless pop-ups like the Zone Alarm firewall always did.

Additionally, my broadband internet speed has increased dramatically (to around 35-40 Mbps) compared to when I tested some other "shareware" firewalls like ZoneAlarm pro; which was effective but quite the resource hog, had a confusing and bloated interface and was surprisingly unstable when I tested the latest version recently.

Good Luck!

 

They're all pretty much the same. All they know is the program name and what it is trying to do. Zonealarm is one of the better ones, and the free one is adequate.

As a rule of thumb, if an alert pops up as a direct result of what you are doing, allow it. If not, deny it (but don't tell it to remember the setting). If you are installing something, always allow it, but again never remember it, or you will get cluttered up with masses of irrelevant rules.

If you run a program you trust and an alert pops up, allow it and remember the setting, otherwise it will keep asking you. After a while it will know what's supposed to be allowed, and the number of alerts will rapidly decrease.

I assume that you have antivirus software installed. (If not, why not?) However it's also worth installing antispyware software. Many alerts can be for spyware wanting access to the internet, or wanting to launch other applications.

If in doubt, Google on the program name to see if it's genuine or malware.

Hope that helps.

 

Obviously not in the UK. We'd die for 35-40 mbps! However I must disagree that ZAPro degrades bandwidth. It doesn't on my (by your standards measly) 4mbps connection.

 

good morning,
Thank you to COMPUABLE and nedsram your help is greatly appreciated.As to antivirus i have AVG FREE, spyware AD-AWARE & Spybot. I will be checking out the ZA forum today.
Thanks,
Dan