ZoneAlarm firewall good or bad ?

[gspeed]

Hi there,

Looking for a firewall for my home Win XP PC I run into ZoneAlarm firewall that appears to be free. Does anybody know how much good or bad is it?

http://www.zonelabs.com/store/conten...lm_details.jsp

Thanks,
g

[DigitalSyntax]

Well to answer your question, iv used it and i think its fine, its good for a free wall (there all others you should check out too at downloads.com) its pretty easy to set up and maintain but again check out others too and see wich you like more. I also did some searching on the site and this has been covered before alot so do a search in the forums for "firewall" and you can see how the other posts were and read about this subject and see what other people have said already, searching is your friend

[Ghostdog]

I use zonealarm for 1 year now and I'm happy. It's a good firewall (or I don't see that I've been hacked).

[jxrry59]

i used zone alarm fo a long time but switched to outpost after hearing about it from members of this site. outpost gives you more control.

[tonybradley]

I use ZoneAlarm as well and have never had a problem with it. The base version of ZoneAlarm is free. You can get it here: Zone Labs

There are many other products- free and not- that people highly recommend. I have seen Sygate come up on here a lot. Windows XP also has a built in firewall, but I haven't played with it to know whether it is any good or not or how it compares with other firewalls.

A lot comes down not only to how the firewalls technically work, but also personal preference. You could download ZoneAlarm and Sygate and maybe a few others. Try them all out one by one and try out the Windows XP firewall and make a decision which one fits you the best

[gspeed]

Thanks a lot for recommendations, I am going to check it...

But having so many Firewalls programs for free, why the one would like to pay for it? Is it all about the level of the security? How could it be measured?

[Trust_Not_123]

um, i havent used zonealarm personally so im not going to comment. but i will comment on the firewall that i have found seems to work the best.

sygate.com should have all the answers.

-cheers

[VictorKaum]

Well, there are many discussions on AO about Zone Alarm.
I say: for beginners it's a good start... but

it is a resource eater
and it has some known problems. Like for instance the fact that before the "you are now protected by ZoneAlarm" screen appears on your windows box, you are litteraly NOT protected. Sounds obvious but remember that it runs after you logged in. Or better between the log in and the actual start of the explorer and other M$ ****. Therefor allowing pc's to run shares without log in and without firewall protection. This worked for the ZA versions I played with.Turn your computer on, do not log in, but use another box to access the shared resources on your box or ping the box... this works, even if you do not allow those actions in ZA. Offcourse when you log in, like you normally do, everything works like it should work. So basicly I think ZA is a good start. It has some flaws, is sometimes overreacting but overall it's ok. Sygate and Outpost are probably better choices.

About free or not. Well many times personal or academic use is free but commercial not. Next, you are talking about "desktop firewalls" that's another category then real hardware firewalls with other customers. Perhaps some people believe in brand names like McAfee, Norton Symantec, ... to trust, and are willing to pay for it.

[EaseZE]

I used zone alarm for a while and never had any problems. I like the alert system and the easier than easy setup. I think its a good choice.

[bballad]

For a single system desktop firewall zone alarm is perfectly fine, a little resource intensive but its ease of use counters that. It dose lack in the antiviral support for the free version, but you should have a separate AV system anyway. The only reason I could see paying for a firewall is if you are trying to do port forwarding or setting up a DMZ and didn't want to learn Linux/BSD.