Avoid ZoneAlarm Like the Plague Until the Bugs are Squashed
Written: Jul 23 '02 (Updated Jul 23 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Blocks trojan horses, spyware, and hacker attacks
Cons: Buggy, unstable, difficult to uninstall when problems arise
The Bottom Line: ZoneAlarm used to be wonderful, but bugs have made me unable to recommend latest versions. I STRONGLY recommend you avoid it.
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| amykhar's Full Review: Zone Alarm |
Last year, I wrote a glowing review of Zone Alarm. I couldn’t get over how well it worked and the fact that it was free. Unfortunately, a lot has changed in a year. Today, I removed it from my husband's computer and have no intentions of ever using it again.
ZoneAlarm is a free personal firewall made available by Zone Labs. It is meant to serve as an enticement to buy their commercial products, ZoneAlarm Plus ZoneAlarm Pro. However, most users that I know never bothered to upgrade to the professional version because previous versions of the free software worked so well. Now, experienced computer users are refusing to upgrade to the paid versions of ZoneAlarm because the newest versions are full of some rather serious bugs.
ZoneAlarm is intended to be a personal firewall that monitors traffic coming into as well as going out of your computer. The first time a program tries to connect to the Internet from your PC, ZoneAlarm prompts the user with a message box. If the program is authorized to access the Net (your email client or chat software, for example) you simply had to tell ZoneAlarm to remember that this program was allowed access. However, if an unauthorized program tried to access the Net, you could tell ZoneAlarm to block that program from accessing the Net. In this manner, you could easily see when spyware, trojan horses, or even a virus was trying to phone home and cut the phone line before the call could be made. When working properly, ZoneAlarm is a truly wonderful tool. The problem is that it simply refused to work properly on many computers.
Stability
On Windows ME, ZoneAlarm ran perfectly well for a number of weeks. Then, it began to crash daily. Frequently, I had to reboot my computer 6 or 7 times just to get the firewall to initialize correctly so that I could connect to the Internet. The error I experienced most often was the True Vector service would fail to initialize properly. When this happened, ZoneAlarm blocked all Internet traffic to my machine. The visual clue that this had happened was that the ZoneAlarm icon in my Windows tray turned to a maroon X. Otherwise, No error message popped up to inform me that ZoneAlarm was not working properly. If a user didn’t notice the X in the tray, he might assume his ISP connection was faulty.
Uninstallation Hell
When I first realized ZoneAlarm’s instability was causing my connection problems, I shut it down and uninstalled it. I received no error messages or any indication that the software had not been correctly uninstalled. Upon completion of the uninstall process, I was prompted to reboot my computer, which I did. Unfortunately, I was unable to connect to the Internet after rebooting. Finally, I used GoBack to restore my computer to a previous state with ZoneAlarm still installed, and was able to connect to my ISP again.
After a bit of research, I learned that uninstalling ZoneAlarm is not a simple process. First, I needed to ensure that the True Vector engine was not running in the background when I tried to uninstall Zone Alarm. This was accomplished by setting Zone Alarm to not run at startup, and then rebooting my computer. After running the uninstall process, I then had to manually ensure that numerous files and directories were deleted from my system. Finally, I had to clear my recycle bin and my Windows temp directory and then reboot. This time, the process worked, and I was able to connect to my ISP again.
If ZoneAlarm is already on your system, you can find complete directions for getting rid of it at the ZoneLabs web site in the support section. There is an optional section in the uninstall directions for clearing the Windows registry; however, I did not do this part. I recommend that you avoid trying to edit the registry unless you truly know what you are doing as registry errors can corrupt your entire system.
Final Recommendations
I can no longer endorse any version of ZoneAlarm. Bugs and instabilty make the software an aggravation that can make it impossible to connect to the Internet. In addition, the uninstall process is too complicated for novice users. Hopefully, Zone Labs will iron out their bugs with the next release and I will be able to recommend them again.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
amykhar
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Member: Amy
Location: USA
Reviews written: 320
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