Review by HealthIT

I’ve used them all… McAfee, Norton, Trend Micro and Zone Alarm. McAfee and Norton are expensive (now zone alarm is too), with little to no real customer support. They all (except Trend Micro which has excellent customer support) charge a fee for calling support.

A Caveat with ZA, If YOU don’t read the begining tutorial, then when your PC doesn’t connect to the internet don’t blame ZA!!! There’s a brief 3 minute tutorial that lets ZA know your level of computer experteise. If you’re a novice, ZA will self-configure the firewall. If you’re an expert, you get to control program access yourself.

Zone Alarm’s Firewall is the best on the market. It is the only firewall to give you an alert WITH a recommended suggestion on what to do based upon it’s knowledge of the program thats trying to access the internet, or trying to receive information from the internet for the first time.

ZA’s firewall is also PC specific. It will alert you if a program is acting suspiciously on your PC and lets you know what to do. Sometimes it doesn’t have a suggestion, so here’s where some common sense comes in, as well as some PC experteise.

If you’re installing a program, or uninstalling, or running a program, and ZA pops up, then it probably is something you want to allow, or it will block what you’re trying to do.

McAfee is effective but slow, Norton doesn’t pick up everything and sometimes can’t delete things and you have to do it manually, Trend Micro also has failed in automatic deletion and has many ‘manual’ removal messages for various viruses and trojans (and we’re paying for what?).

Zone Labs is one of the few that have caught, and automatically deleted most test viruses and trojans (and real) that I’ve run on my PC.

It wins out over the other 3 in that it gives the user super control over the PC. You get automatic deletion and/or quarantene You get to say what program gets access, which program does not, and how often. You can approve every attempt to access the internet by a program, or every time something from the internet tries to access your PC. So, its great for the intermediate and the expert user alike.

Cons: Its spyware isn’t up to par with any other program. Ad-aware, spybot search and destroy and pest patrol are far supeior.

It takes a little PC adeptness to correctly use this program. If you block the wrong program, or deny the wrond network connection, you’ll be blocked from accessing the internet, or sharing files or something you don’t want. Hence the many people who complain about it. This is by far the best program on the market for your money, but you need to be adept and familir with networking, windows, ports that programs use to access the net, what every program is and why it is accessing the net, ETC. If you don’t know, then get a different program. McAfee and Norton are effective but you don’t get the control and ease of use. Trend Micro is the easiest of all, but you don’t get firewall controll over outbound connections.

So, this is not a novice program, and should be used by the more experienced.

Overall, the speed and firewall coupled with an antivirus program that actually works led me to keep ZoneLabs my internet security suite for over 2 years now. (though I do run McAfee, AVG, Norton, and trend on other pc’s), on my personal PC that I use the most, I trust ZA for the best security.

PC Geek tested and approved! A.

They only get 4 stars because they charge you for customer support (BOO 70 dollars isn’t enough for the program AND support?). Otherwise, this is a must have for anyone truly concerned about PC and internet security.