Recent Zone Alarm Free 9.1 Install

[Bob Carruth]

I finally gave up on Comcast's free McAfee Security Center since it now takes way too many resources for my 2003 Dell 8300 to handle.

Since my Laptop has been incident free for over 6 months running AVG Free and Zone Alarm Free I successfully completely removed McAfee (using their removal tool) and installed the current versions of both of the above.

To my chagrin Zone Alarm was executing about 3000 disc writes a second.

Found this on the Zone Alarm forum and now all is well:

"A Chat with Zone Alarm support staff determined that this was a consequence of a relative new feature in ZA. Diagnostics are available. The default setting is NOT off. Previous versions of ZA did not write much to the diagnostic file, but the latest version is acknowledged as writing more than it need. Turning off diagnostics solved the problem, now ZLCLIENT is quite quiet. One would not discover how to turn diagnostics off by looking at the standard GUI. The instructions are: ctrl+shift+right click on the ZA icon in the bottom right SysTray area. Then choose ‘Set debug level’. In the dialogue, set Debug to ‘Off’. Diagnostics will cease when ZA is ShutDown and restarted, or the PC is rebooted. The diagnostic file is ‘tvDebug’ in ‘\Windows\Internet Logs’. I had noticed that this file was rather large. Now it’s size is just a few Kb."

A nice bonus to removing McAfee is that now my Microsoft Mouse runs extremely smoothly under the latest version of Intellipoint.

[Steve Grisetti]

Nice finds, Bob!

I've actually been experimenting with Microsoft Security Essentials, the new, free version of Microsoft's not-terribly-successful Live One Care. It combines a firewall, anti-spyware and anti-virus system, and seems to work very well and use very few resources. I guess it depends on how much you trust Microsoft -- but it's looking like a pretty good alternative the Zone Alarms, AVGs and even Avasts.

[Bob Carruth]

Steve, I've been looking at Microsoft, too. I guess it mostly depends on whether one is comfortable with an "inbound only" firewall. I can find persuasive arguments on both sides. It appears that the AV section is excellent and very efficient. When (and if) it will play nice with Zone Alarm I'll definitely give it a try but I really like to know which programs are trying to phone home and easily decide whether they are allowed to or not.

A little paranoia doesn't hurt.