Order of the Bath

This may not come as a surprise to some people but I seem to have missed out on it. This is what happened. I have been a loyal user of ZoneAlarm through to version 4.5 and recognised it for the best personal firewall around. It was the only one I had seen that put complete control into the hands of the user without making the management incomprehensible to the novice. The only one which really controlled outgoing traffic properly. I was guided in this by well respected commentators such as Steve Gibson and Fred Langa plus many other votes of support far outweighing anything negative. Every machine that I built (and there have been a few over the years), even for the first timer, had it installed.

Then version 5 came along and things seemed to change. The pundits were urging caution and there were rumours of instability. The word went out to hold back before upgrading and let things settle down. That always seems like good advice to me. So I hung onto my last copy of the 4.5 version (4.5.594), switched off automatic notification and continued to install it on new builds. Then everything seemed to go quiet and, before I knew it, version 6 was out. And the story was the same, rumours of instability, hang on until 6.1 etc. Go back to sleep.

Then came the crunch. I was preparing a new laptop for a friend (a rather nice HP 17″ widescreen) and was going through the motions of creating accounts and installing essential software when BANG—a blue screen error. This was one of the very few BSoDs that I had seen on XP, especially since SP2 but fortunately I got the m/c into safe mode and discovered the error log fairly quickly. ZoneAlarm was clearly implicated—some sort of clash with the graphics driver—so I uninstalled ZA and finished the build. [The log is in Start—>Control Panel—>Administrative Tools—>Event Viewer.] Fortunately this machine wasn’t to leave my hands for a couple of weeks so I had time to do some research; find another firewall I thought.

But first, let’s see what ZoneAlarm 6 is like. The stories I had seen indicated that it had grown into a clumsy behemoth trying to do everything (there will probably be a post on this subject sometime) and, in the process, it had made itself intrusive raising alarms and warnings at the slightest cause and doing so in terms that the average user would not understand. I downloaded the freebie and installed it on my desktop, making sure I had a good backup and a copy of the tried and trusted version available. Much to my surprise it was identical to v4.5, even down to the bilious yellow. It was very hard to see the few changes. It now seems to be unable to distinguish between Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer and there are still the same meaningless internal processes but all seems well—and it was still fine a week later so I installed it on the laptop and there were no problems. I have since installed it on the Church Office machine with no ill effects and will do Mary’s laptop soon. Note: it is less traumatic to use the upgrade option rather than the clean install, especially for novice users, else they will get rather too many unexpected alerts.

Conclusion: ZoneAlarm (Free) is still a first class product and is quite stable. I recommend it to all home users. It does exactly what it should do and not much more (switch off things like the eBay password stuff). Just after completing the exercise, Fred Langa clarified his own recommendation saying that it was only the “Pro” version that he had doubts about. Thanks.

This entry was posted on 27 Oct 2005 at 10:46 by Rick and is filed under Technical, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.