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Zone Alarm Security Suite |
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Written by Von
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Saturday, 16 June 2007 |
I have been using Zone Alarm Internet Security Suite for little under a year, my subscription is due in a few weeks and I am not going to re-subscribe. I have had a mixed experience of Zone Alarm in the past year, having used versions 6.5 and 7.
Zone Alarm Security Suite has several features:
- Privacy and Identity Protection
- Instant Messenger Security
The firewall works well, allowing program control for in and outbound connection to the internet. There is also a feature that will alert you to changes to the registry and changes to start up processes. Zone Alarm will "learn" your program usage, and allow or deny access to the internet. You can customize individual program access and how ZA will react to new programs that try to connect to the Internet.
I've only had one virus warning from the AV feature, the virus scan hasn't picked up any viruses and I've not had any other problems that I can tell. Overall the AV feature seems to be effective, although I don't have anything to compare it against and haven't had anything for it to deal with.
The anti-spyware finds tracking cookies every time it scans, apart from that I don't get any spyware alerts except GameSpy Arcade (a client to connect to online game servers) which isn't spyware but appears every time it changes. It isn't hard to stop the spyware scanner from overlooking programs that aren't a threat.
I haven't used the email protection, because it only supports Outlook and Outlook Express. This is a little disappointing, but is expected with mainstream programs. Luckily I haven't opened/had any dodgy emails so that hasn't been much of a problem.
Identity protection does nothing more than logging your keystrokes and removing certain combinations, like your mother's maiden name or your email address. I don't see this as any use because I am not in the habit of entering my personal data unless I need to (it is very frustrating trying to pay for something online and find everything gets asterisked out!).
The instant messenger security didn't impress me in 6.5 version, and is more or less useless in 7.0. I use MSN/Windows Live Messenger but the IM Security feature messed with the connection and prevented any of the multimedia features of MSN Messenger, allowing only text communication. This fault was well known by Zone Labs and they didn't try to fix it until they updated to version 7. The actual features of IM Security are the ability to restrict multimedia, you can also encrypt communications (so long as the other party has Zone Alarm). There is a blocker for messages sent from people not in your contact list, and a blocker for malicious links. All of these things can be done within the IM programs themselves (except encryption).
Parental Control will block categories of websites. The categories range from the usual adult content, hacking, crime, and weapons to gay/lesbian, shopping, search engines, and web hosing. There is nowhere to add other sites not included in one of these categories. I haven't tried testing lots of sites, but the obvious ones are blocked with a message about the sites category.
With all those features, Zone Alarm isn't a small program. The memory usage was high enough with version 6.5 (around 60MB), but version 7 uses over 100MB minimum. This is partly due to the Kasperspy AV and AS engines Zone Labs now use. The whole suite doesn't use more than 1 or 2% of my CPU (a fairly high end dual core), but for an AV and Firewall, 100MB is really too much.
Also, there is a game mode function that will suppress all alerts when it is activated. This is meant to stop games from minimizing while you are playing. It works when I remember to start it, but Zone Alarm really ruins my gaming when i forget. Any game will minimize almost every time I play without game mode enabled. I have even had zone alarm causing my system to crash to bluescreen, I get the "irql not less or equal" error (usually to do with bad memory). I have tested this extensively and the problem is definitely associated with zone alarm. When zone alarm checks for updates (several times a day), games will minimize unless game mode is enabled.
Overall, Zone Alarm is almost as functional as Zone Labs claim. I would recommend it to a casual desktop user, as an all inclusive internet security package. However, for a performance enthusiast, I feel it uses too much memory and isn't ideally suited to gaming. Now my subscription is up, I am going to try Nod32 for my antivirus/antispyware and Look 'n' Stop for my firewall. |
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