Cheap ZoneAlarm Pro 2 (Software) (Windows NT, Windows 98, Windows 95) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of ZoneAlarm Pro 2

worked good until......
this program worked great until i simply wanted to turn it off for bit. when i turned it back on it was letting everything through. checked all the settings no luck. when i un installed it, the program managed to delete all my ports (common with braodband users). which made accessing the internet impossible. since it was the download i had no other choice but to format my hard drive. it turns out i was not alone, several people have ran into the same problem including some reviewers of this product. so i hope this helps to answer some of your questions. if you have dsl or dial up this does not seem to happen.

---

Some problems
I bought this product since of all the personal firewall products out there, it seemed to get the best review.

My initial experience with it was good, although a reviewer in CPU magazine had warned that it could conflict with Norton Anti-Virus. For a couple of days I had no problems. The interface is easy and intuitive and the configuration screens for selecting what you want blocked and filtered are easy to figure out and work your way thru. So far so good.

Then I installed a couple of small, new programs. These were Fail-Safe Technologies Guard IE program, a great little program which prevents websites from opening up all those annoying extra windows and advertisements in your browser--including something called embedded drop-down windows--and everything went downhill from there. The second program was Intel's Netboost Netsonic web-caching program, which speeds up the loading of web pages by caching previously used graphics and text, and only loading the elements that have changed. This is especially useful if you're on a slow dial-up collection, and the program works very well for that.

Unfortunately, everything went downhill from there, to the point where ZoneAlarm had everything locked down so thoroughly that I couldn't access the web at all. Furthermore, even after de-installing both these programs, I still could not access any website, or get email from my dial-up Earthlink account. I don't know which of the two programs was causing the problem with ZoneAlarm, or whether it was both, but anyway, obviously there was some sort of conflict.

Since then I've deinstalled and restalled ZoneAlarm, and although that did help quite a bit, occasionally I'll fire up my browser and I won't able to access any websites, even though, as far as I can see, nothing has changed in the configuration.

I'm still trying to troubleshoot these problems, so if I figure it out, I'll post another message here. In the meantime, I would have to say my initial enthusiasm for the product is somewhat dampened.

---

Must have for Cable/DSL connections
ZoneAlarm works by blocking unwanted intrusions into your system. After being on some download sites, I've had over 500 hits in less than and hour! Granted, most of these are from the server trying to see whether the computer is still active, but it's good to know you have some measure of security. A truly determined hacker can get through it (and most any other firewall for that matter), but in most cases ZoneAlarm is a more than adequate first step for Internet security...

In all, ZoneAlarm is worth the money...