Review by Karl

I have been a Symantec/Norton customer for 15 years or so and never cared for early versions of ZA that I saw on other people’s computers. The free-after-rebate offer tempted me to give ZA a try … and I have to say that overall, I’m much more pleased with it than Norton Internet Security 2006.

ZA’s antispam feature beats Norton’s hands-down - putting almost all spam and no good mails into the spam folder. Norton only gets about half on my laptop.

ZA’s firewall seems to have more control than Norton, certainly more information. With any firewall, it is OK for geeks like me, but ordinary users probably will accidentally block something that shouldn’t be and end up with system problems. ZA and Norton need a better interface for Mom and Pop type users. I like the amount of control and the detailed logs.

My main frustrations with ZA are:nn1. it seems to slow down the startup of every program. I have turned off the feature to scan programs on startup, but it doesn’t help. System feels sluggish compared to the way it operated with Norton.

2. I have a satellite internet connection shared with Windows Internet Connection Sharing. It took almost an hour to track down the proper help information to find the advanced settings dialog to make the host and clients see each other properly. As with other things, could be better documented.

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