ZoneLabs makes the worst garbage ever!

[nite_monkey]

ZoneLabs, the makers of ZoneAlarm firewall, makes the worst programs EVER! They are worst than viruses! All the viruses I have ever had only make 1 to a couple of programs stop working, where as ZoneLabs' crap makes EVERYTHING stop working. I installed their firewall on my computer a long time ago, it crashed my computer, I had to put my hard drive in a different computer, and remove the firewall, and just today I installed their internet security suite, because I had forgot that I had already tried their firewall, and then when it told me to restart my computer and got back to windows, the piece of crap blocked everything on my computer from running, so I had to restart into safe mode and uninstall it. When I say it blocked everything, I mean, when ever I try to open anything, it instantly crashes before it opens. I couldn't even open the task manager. The only thing I could open was my computer. So I will never be using anything ZoneLabs makes ever again. If you have had any problems with their garbage, let me know, I want to see what problems other people are having.

[Josh]

I never had any of the described problems when I trialed their internet security suite (which is still installed and running). Yes, by default, it makes you setup rules for your apps, but after that it has been smooth sailing.

As for having to swap your hard drive to another computer, I honestly dont see how this would allow you to fix something that having it installed in the other PC wouldnt unless you had other HARDWARE issues on the original PC.

[nite_monkey]

no what I meant by putting it in a different computer was putting it in as a second hard drive.

[f0dder]

*shrug*

I never had a problem with ZoneLabs software, when I used it several years ago. Perhaps you have some flaky windows install, perhaps there's some software conflict, etc... not to be overly defensive of ZoneLabs, but I haven't heard of a lot of people with with bad problems.

[nudone]

i gave up using firewalls because of zone alarm - but i won't repeat all that again - oh, okay then, there appears to be a common problem with the ZA firewall when you uninstall it or update it - tried all the work arounds i could find online - didn't work. had the same problem on friends machines - so i gave up.

f0dder gave me good reasons not to bother with a firewall so i won't complain about ZA too much - well, it is pathetic that it can't even update/uninstall/reinstall itself. up until that point i'd been a happy user of ZA for many years.

[Hirudin]

I used to use ZA, but I couldn't make it work with Counterstrike Source, so I had to ditch it. I'm using Kaspersky now and I'm quite happy with it. ~23mb download!

[Nxqd3051990]

ZoneLabs' Software is really weigh, it takes my computer down. I don't wanna use it anymore
nXqd

[Perry Mowbray]

I'm reconsidering my use of ZA at the moment... I recently upgraded to the Internet Suite but it really has slowed my system down significantly where the free product didn't.

• Getting to the log-on screen can take minutes after coming back from StandBy.
• Sometimes my system will just hang, it's like it's doing something but the CPU activity is zip, then it'll come back for a millisecond then go off with the fairies again 

got to investigate further to see if it really is ZA, but that's my assumption at the moment...

[Perry Mowbray]

got to investigate further to see if it really is ZA, but that's my assumption at the moment...

-Perry Mowbray (July 01, 2007, 10:21 PM)

It was ZA! Turn Anti-Virus off and I can switch users immediately, turn Anti-Virus on and it takes five minutes to switch users!

[Jimdoria]

I've used the free ZoneAlarm firewall for years, without any incident. It does have a few flaky things, such as I 've seen it block things even when it wasn't supposed to. But I've never had anything like the problems described.

My chief complaint these days is that they bundled their anit-spam product in the latest upgrade to the free version. This thing was dog slow and crashed Outlook frequently, but it wasn't to tough to get rid of it, and it's hard to complain too much about a free program.

But yeah, ZA is definitely slow, especially when starting up. Once running it's pretty trouble free though, at least for me.

Whether I actually need it or not is another question. 

[IL1keT0Donate]

Well for what its worth until a month ago i'd only ever used their ZoneAlarm Pro firewall and was very happy with the results.

Just recently I've had reason to trial ZoneAlarm Free on a notebook and it's basic and basically a firewall that's been crippled of features although by accident I did discover that a feature they don't mention has been running in the background which is part of their ZoneAlarm Forcefiled program which is supposed to be a transparant to use Virtual broswer capable of stopping any nasties that are looking to get into the system.

I went looking to buy ZA Pro and perhaps ZA Forecfield too found that a discount coupon that has not been stopped although it was supposed to be active until 30th November 2010, BUT the catch is the coupon is only a discount off the full retail price.

So I was looking for ZoneAlarm Pro and ZoneAlarm Forcefield and discovered it was cheaper to buy ZoneAlarm Extreme Security once the 'discounted from full retail price' coupon was applied andas it happens the Extreme Security version comes with an AntiVirus & AntiSpyware software too so I'll get a chance to see what their other programs are like and see if nite_monkey was right or not

Incase anyone is interested iin seeing if the coupon works (but only at ZoneAlarms own website not a 3rd party site) for them, the 'all caps' coupon is: SAVE60

For example:at 6am California time December 3rd 2010 (as I type this email)
2 years 3xPC ZoneAlarm Pro Discounted price is USD$59.95 but once the SAVE60 was applied [60% off price from full retail USD$99.95] the new price is USD$39.98
2 years 3xPC ZoneAlarm Forcefiled price is USD$49.95 but once the SAVE60 was applied [60% off price from full retail USD$49.95] the new price is USD$19.98
2 years 3xPC ZoneAlarm Extreme Security is USD$79.95 but once the SAVE60 was applied [60% off price from full retail $129.95] the new price is USD$51.98

hope it helps somebody

[40hz]

I've been annoyed by some of ZoneAlarm's behaviors in the past. And I don't like the 800-pound gorilla approach it seems to want to take with its current security suite. But neither I nor any of my clients have encountered what you're seeing. I'm gonna +1 w/f0dder on his suspicion you either have a bum install somewhere - or something on your machine that's conflicting with ZoneLabs.

------------

I used to use ZoneLabs firewall. I stopped a while back when it started to bloat up and switched over to Comodo firewall. I've since stopped using all 3rd party firewall software and simply go with the built-in that comes with Windows 7.

Used in conjunction with the security features in my router, the Windows 7 firewall provides me with as much "firewalling" as I need for what I'm doing.

Staying on top of Microsoft updates and a decent anti-malware product (or two) is the balance of my desktop security setup. This provides me with a very robust defense that doesn't bog down my machine or annoy me with constant false alarms.

Note: A little common sense when it comes to dealing with suspicious looking e-mail and other objects also does its part to help keep things secure.  

I haven't encountered any breaches, infections, or other security issues using this arrangement. Or at least not (knock wood) so far.