On 6/8/07, Jones, John (US) <John.Jones@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://windowssecrets.com/reviews/security-baseline/ shows that Zone
Alarm's suite is getting top honors right now. I personally use
CounterSpy (http://sunbelt-software.com) for anti-spyware (AS) & AVG
(http://free.grisoft.com) for AV.
I'll just throw in my 2¢ here. I have never had a problem with the ZA
Internet Suite that I haven't been able to solve with a lot of guesswork and
crossing of fingers and picking up bits and pieces of advice on this list as
well as the windowssecrets newsletters. IOW, CheckPoint's support of ZA
sucks. *TOTALLY SUCKS*. I have *never* received anything other than
useless automated responses to my questions, and I have had to spend endless
hours collating information from other users' posts in their forums to come
up with the information I needed to solve the problems I was having with
it. So, unless you have a good technical understanding of firewalls, just
beware of support issues with CheckPoint. I let my subscription expire back
in February, and started using AVG-free and Spybot Search & Destroy, in its
place. I still use the ZA firewall, since that doesn't seem to get updated
very often, and I'm sitting behind a router.
I totally agree that Norton sucks, and the difference in performance was
night and day after I uninstalled every last vestige of the pre-installed
package on my eMachines PC a few years ago.
But, you should also note that even a package like ZA can be a drain on your
system. What are the specs on the "crappy Dell XP home computer" you speak
of? Unless you're running a dream system like John's, you'll probably
notice a difference in performance. If you're running on 256MB of RAM on a
1GHz CPU (I've seen worse running XP!), well, yeah, performance will be
miserable.
John, question re
I'd prefer an integrated suite v. point solutions
for AV, AS, anti-spam, and firewall.
Isn't the recommendation from windowssecrets to avoid the integrated suites,
and to use the individual firewall, AV, and spyware apps? I might be
thinking of Scot Finnie's recommendation, it's been awhile since I reviewed
that info.
- Dan
midrange.com
