I tried Zone Alarm, and hated it. I have had clients who were complaining about their computers starting up and running slowly, when I went to troubleshoot the problem, I found Zone Alarm was running.

The POS is the worst firewall I have ever run into. It takes up too many resources to be worth having. I have run the vulnerabilities test at dslreports, and Zone Alarm gave me the worst results out of the firewalls I tried. Tell your friend to switch to a different firewall.

I would never let Zone Alarm be the only firewall protecting my computer, I just don't trust it.