Just thought I would post a copy of a message I ran across in one of my internet clubs. I never liked it here is why.

Hi Pat,

I just wanted to put in my two cents here. I work on the tech support line
for an isp. I whole heartedly agree that everyone NEEDS to have BOTH a
virusscanner and a firewall. However - I would never ever recommend
zonelabs. I have had too many calls from people who installed it and it
caused so many problems with their connections or OS that it is not worth
it. Zone alarm knows it is not good - they have so many fixes on their
site - if you know how to find them and can connect to get them - that it
is unbelievable.

I average approx 40 calls per night - and at least 10-15 are about problems
caused by zone alarm or zone alarm pro.

Please consider this.

Thanks

Karen

www.Pe7e.com
Pe7e

I think that goes against the general consensus (at least around here) that ZoneAlarm is the firewall of choice. Check out what www.grc.com has to say about it..in particular, the part about "anyone want a barely used copy of BlackIce Defender?"

BlackICE PC Protection (as it is now known) is just as effective as any other software firewall; in some ways, more so (despite what Steve Gibson would have you believe).

BI now acts as a standard application gate (as do ZAP et al) and only user specified applications are permitted to establish a connection. However, where BI differs from ZAP et al is in the way in which both inward and outward bound traffic is handled. ZAP et al will refuse outgoing connections which the user has not approved and will refuse incoming connections which the user has neither approved nor initiated; BI, however, will not only block outgoing connections which the user has not approved but will also examine the data passing through those approved applications in order to check for possible harmful content and incoming data is allowed unless determined to be hostile.

The fact that BI serves not only as an application gate but also as an IDS provides an additional layer of security. A standard firewall is rendered useless if the user makes an error in granting application permissions or if malware manages to piggyback out (leaktest style) using some other approved application. BI would not, however, be left for dead in such cirumstances as its IDS capabilities would (hopefully) detect the hostile traffic.

BI is actually quite nice - its resource usage falls somewhere between that of KPF (at the lower end of the scale) and ZAP (at the upper end), it performs effectively and uninstalls cleanly removing itself completely from the registry (now why can't ZAP do that?).

BTW - although I liked BI, I didn't keep it; there's too many good freebies to be had!

I followed the directions and It works perfectly for me. The one problem I had was when XP was still in Beta and Zone Labs corrected it immediately.

Any chance those calls were from people who just didn't know how to use ZA? And, what fixes?

I haven't had any real trouble with ZA on three computers, other than getting it configured correctly for what I want blocked.

JP

CTSIE

Agreed, simply people who are unable to follow the directions and configure it correctly.

DATERMINEHTOR

MY HOME PAGE!

GO LEAFS GO!

http://daterminehtor.blogspot.com/

  

I'll add RTFM, or in the case of ZoneAlarm, RTFZAT

Whats with all the acronyms! CTSIE? RTFM? RTFZAT?

I know there were acronym posts before, but usually I know them or figure them out, but hmm...i've done a lot of work these past few days, how about just telling me those 2...3

RTFM = Read The F***ing Manual
RTFZAT = Read The F***ing Zone Alarm Tutorial
CTSIE = Chair To System Interface Error

MSU

Crunk,

I'm with you on all the abbreviations. I spent the longest time with the simplest acronyms until someone on this site led me here http://www.acronymfinder.com/ a while ago and those problems (at least) seem to be over.

Dave

Dave

Dell 8300 Dimension
Pentium 4
W XP Home


www.woodenpropeller.com

Zone alarm has worked very well for me. Never a single problem. I bet the real problem mentioned in that piece is caused by the silly software provided by the ISP.

Garbru

My ISP even goes so far as to recommend Zonealarm Here: http://www.mcs.net.au/freebies.htm .

That idiotic letter merely confirms my opinion of tech support in general and ISP tech support in particular.

Shelly

Indeed. Just because someone answers the tech support line for an ISP, it doesn't prove that they know anything about computers. They may have been working at McDonald's the week before.

ZoneAlarm works fine for me.

We have a building here in Jacksonville with a couple of thousand tech support people in cubicles 24 hours a day. It's one of AOL's support answering centers. They are mostly all local people and most of them probably never used a computer before they were hired there at around minimum wage.

Shelly

Now we know where Shelly gets his seemingly endless supply of computer knowledge. }>

Agreed Shelly......hey, I miss Florida..

Be well...


Meehowski

It's not Zone Alarm's fault that so many users are instruction challenged.

There is without a doubt some real junk available out there for download but it's too bad reputable places get slammed for what is nothing more than user ineptitude plain and simple.

The readme's and/or instructions that accompany software are after all created for a reason. Too bad they usually get looked at after the excrement hits the rotary oscillator.

It's not Zone Alarm's fault that so many users are
instruction challenged.

Such users should really look an easily configured non-software alternative such as this. It is remarkably simple to configure, RTFMing takes only a few seconds and the product guarantees 100% safety from all forms of internet threat.

If the plug is still in the socket, that would be a blinding experience, to say the least. LOL

Hogwash! Although a (relatively small) number of people have found version 3 to be somewhat buggy, those bugs can easily be linked to ZAF/ZAP and nobody (other than a idiot) would have cause to phone their ISP about the problems caused by those bugs. Although neither ZAF or ZAP would be my product of choice, they are both reasonable PF's.

Overlooked in these responses is the fact that most calls are going to be about ZA because that is what is most used. Probably, as a percentage of firewall products, problems are fewer than all others.

Ever noticed that whatever you happen to use for OS, AV or firewall is what is causing the problem? Has any ISP tech support ever admitted that they screwed up?

One once convinced me that my problem was hardware related. A $35 call to the manufacturer got me a straight answer. When confronted with the facts, the ISP twit passed me up to someone who knew enough to get me going again after a few keystrokes.

PC911 might have saved me that $35 if I had known about them at the time. Hope you newbies get that message.

Pointman

I've been running ZA for a long time on 3 pc's with different OS's without any problems.

I have to question the "tech's" abilities too.

I agree. When I called my old ISP with a problem ,it was usually my computer.I changed ISP.

Jeannie

Jeannie

Well, in my case, i have never been able to get past the blue screens i get from ZA.

I dont consider myself to be a stupid pc user and actually, many of the people i know would probably class me as an intermediate to advanced. I have read all the manuals, had all the updates and even had it all configured and running properly several times, and i still get blue screens.

I think it's pretty unfair to assume that if a person has bad luck with a particular software that it is because they are incompetent.

Many times when you buy hardware, it will come with its own software. Sometimes, software "a" just doesnt work well with software "b".
Maybe my video card software dont work well with ZA.

Does that mean I am stupid????

Hardly.

And I hardly think "works for me" is a solution.

I would love to be using ZA, and I do own it, Pro version in fact. But hours and hours and hours of dealing with what it does to my pc tells me I cant run it.

And Shelly is very correct.. most often Tech Support = No Support.



t_bare


Edit: I guess nobody said I was stupid so I changed some of my wording. But I have to add that I personally dont feel very comfortable with the fact that if I was to start a thread saying "ZA gives me blue screens", that so many people would first think to themselves that I am having trouble because I am incompetent or havent RTFM.

And if we all knew in advance that what we were going to do would result in a blue screen, we probably wouldn't do it.

Personally, I have always liked ZA, in the past, when I was using Win98 as my OS. Happily I never had any problems, either installing or uninstalling, and had the tendency to regard other people's difficulties as a product of their own stupidity.

Then I installed WinXP, in January, and the problems came. Never used Version 3.0 but sayed with ZAP 2.6.362. I did not have any BSODs but my web pages seemed to crawl. I uninstalled, clean installed and followed all instructions, to no avail.
Determined to prevail I even reformatted... but nothing worked.

Finally, I decided to try KERIO. It has a steeper learning curve but appears to have a smaller footprint and very stable. Passes all the tests in Stealth Mode.

I'm not criticizing ZA or ZAP, but its not for me, with my current system. Still miss its Disneyland and colorful GUI, however. That's why there are choices in the marketplace.

Guns don't kill people. Husbands who come home early kill people.

But I have to add that I personally dont feel very comfortable with the fact that if I was to start a thread saying "ZA gives me blue screens", that so many people would first think to themselves that I am having trouble because I am incompetent or havent RTFM.


Hopefully, if you were to start such a thread people would endeavour to be helpful. However, that wasn't the case here; Pe7e didn't mention that *he* had experienced any problems with ZAF/ZAP - he was simply copying a post from some other source.

Kerio is a great little firewall and the price is right. Some ping times are a bit higher but I do love the protection Kerio provides.

t_bare

>Edit: I guess nobody said I was stupid so I changed some of
>my wording. But I have to add that I personally dont feel
>very comfortable with the fact that if I was to start a
>thread saying "ZA gives me blue screens", that so many
>people would first think to themselves that I am having
>trouble because I am incompetent or havent RTFM.

t_bare I most certainly do understand your point but there is no getting around the basic fact that an extremely high percentage of problems could be avoided if people just RTFM first before installing rather than the other way around.

That is not to say that there are't legitimate problems in some cases due to some sort of conflict because that does happen but every time in the past three years that I have had occasion to call my ISP the first thing they ask about and want removed is the firewall and shockingly the second was the anti virus program. If this is their solution to every problem then I'm sorry but they are incompetent morons in my book. Furthermore in each of those situations the glitch was found to originate at the ISP's end and not mine as they always imply.

Probably the most notable bit of info pertaining to Zone Alarm was posted earlier and that is that sure there will be lots of tech support calls involving ZA considering it is among if not the most popular firewall being used today.

I have been using ZA, and later ZA Pro almost since it was introduced. Over the years I have encountered conflicts, all of which were easily solved from checking the Zone Labs help section. The first was a conflict with DialPad back when it was new and free. I checked the online help, and found specific instructions to get DialPad working.

Recently, with the upgrade to ZA Pro 3.0, I found the internet totally blocked, it took just a few minutes to find out that the ZA Privacy settings had to be disabled because I was running XP with IE6 Privacy and the two Privacy features conflicted. I could have thrown up my hands and removed ZA and tried a different firewall, but I knew that was unnecessary. The people at Zone Labs are not fools. They would not release a program that had been a year or so in development, that did not work with any existing Windows OS. I always approach every problem knowing there is a solution that only needs to be found. When any problem occurs, the only thing, or person, I blame is myself.

Shelly

I finally installed ZAP3 this past week. I printed out the manual and did read it first. I also have been following ZAP3 threads here, on 2 security forums, and in the GRC news groups. Therefore, I knew going in, that I did not want to enable the ZAP privacy settings.

The only problem that I had after installation, was trying to figure out a setting to enable one thing to work. Once I bothered to look at the manual, I was able to properly configure ZAP.

In reading the manual and the sources mentioned above, I knew that I should remove all traces of the previous version of ZAP before installing ZAP 3.0.118.

Folks that add any software that interacts with their internet connection need to know what they are doing before they install anything. Firewalls, anti-virus programs, ad blockers, and more, can obviously affect your ability to access the internet. Many users have no idea what's going on, but they do know that they can't access the internet -- so they call ISP tech support.

marti

I am a former user of Zone alarm. I ran into trouble with it, so I now use Tiny Personal Firewall which I feel works much better. I posted this letter so others can see people have problems with Zonealarm.

I tested Tiny Personal Firewall at Steve Gibson's website, and it passed all tests. Plus its free and you are not required to register it. I found Zone did not work with certain websites and it interfered with some software.



PE7E

www.Pe7e.com
Pe7e

Check out the latest copy of Consumer Reports where they review firewalls and anti virus programs. Zone Alarm wins hands down. BUT, they also rank McAfee anitvirus close to Norton, which they thought was best. Go figure.

You are not required to register ZoneAlarm either.