Many of you might know me as the OA guy. Well for the past months I have been trying out different firewalls. I was along time user of Comodo 2.4 but it had one draw back. It never remembered anything. When Comodo 3.0 came out I tried and was baffled by so many options and pop ups. Then I saw ZAAS for free on patch tuesday and I used it for awhile but 36k usage I thought was much. Then I tried Online Armor and was impressed. Well here is the problem. I am a gamer. I play WOW,BF2,COD2,COD4,Q4,HL2,TF2,BF2142,C&C3 and many other games. When you launch any game you get tons of pop ups about trusting the program. Both Comodo and OA did this alot. Then if you patch the game you need to walk through the steps again. Video card drivers change atleast 4 times a month sometimes. Everytime I was installing new drivers either OA or Comodo would go nuts. Well tonight WOW locked up on me and so did Firefox. I quit out of OA and all was normal. My system seems slow with Comodo or OA. Even starting up Limewire or Yahoo Messenger took awhile. Well I cleaned out my registry and thought I would try ZAAS again. I was shocked that the boot up time delay was gone. Even though the 2 services it runs takes anywhere from 25k to 36k I dont notice any slow downs. Browsing and lauching any app is faster. The one thing I love about ZAAS or just plain ZA is that if I launch a game it will minimize it so I can click "allow". It also remembers and only asks you about a program once or twice. Both OA and Comodo can make games lock up when they are trying to launch. Then you need to ctrl-alt-del out of the game just to click "allow". Maybe all this HIPS stuff is out of control. Sure you want protection but it comes with a price. System slow downs. Maybe its just my pc but try it for yourselves. I use NOD32 2.7 so I feel pretty safe. Sure ZAAS doesnt have all the bells and whistles that Comodo and OA do. Sure it may not detect a keylogger as good as the rest but Matousec rated it right below Comodo and OA, so it cant be all that bad. Its odd to say but my pc runs quicker using ZAAS even though it takes up more resources. I think the system slow downs using OA and or Comodo come from the HIPS protection and other filtering components. OA was always asking me things. I use Weather Watcher and it would give me 6 pop ups. ZAAS gave me 2 and thats it. Even after hitting allow and remember OA still asked me about Weather Watcher again. So now I can see where some still use Windows firewall. I have ZAAS for a year for free so I will keep it. Hell by then so many new products will be out there. Take care and Merry Christmas.
One thing is really much much better in ZAAS then in other mentioned firewalls: Outlook password encryption, Comodo does not have this ability, if you check your outlook boxes and use packet sniffer without Zone Alarm then you can see all your passwords within the sniffer not so with Zone Alarm, this may be the biggest advantage of ZA. But actually I prefer best protection against evil keyspys thats the reason why I´ve chosen comodo.
You can do a lot worse than ZAAS. Excellent leak protection, works very well with the vast majority of security software. I'm currently running it with AntiVir PE Premium, BOClean, and Norton AutoBot on my XP Pro machine. Fast boot time, reasonable system resource usage. Good deal!
I know. People make fun of ZA, so did I. But it took my about 10-15 min to set it up and learn all my 180 apps. No crashing. No lock ups. And the best of all. Once it asks you allow or deny it REMEMBERS.
Hey Vettetech. You talked me into giving ZAAS another go. Of course that isn't very hard to do. LOL. Are you sure that 15 second delay at the Welcome screen is gone? Other than that I really liked ZAAS. OA Free is nice and Comodo isn't as scary as it first seems. But I do think that overall, ZAAS is just an easy and formidable security program.
Its still there but no where near as bad. That is for me that is. Boot time is about the same as OA. I cleaned out my pref etch folder also and used Perfectdisk off line defragger.
Well, if you set ZA's features on maximum level plus component control, I truly doubt any keylogger would be able to pass it. However, like WordWard already said ZA's inbound protection is the highest you can get-almost no malware will enter,even if it does it will be either blocked or killed by OSFirewall.
I might set it to max. Need to learn some more apps then I will be all set. FF is even faster. No slow downs at all browsing. Comodo,OA and Outpost all sllow down your internet.Web page loading that is.
I set 'Program Control' to 'High' once I ran all of my internet accessible apps. I get the occasional component change alert, or a media player wanting to use a set of .DLLs. Aside from those infrequent instances, cool runnings mon!
I'm on a 15 day trial of ZAAS myself right now, after trying several others,and will probably activate ZAAS before the trial period ends.
Not true. Not true at all. The only thing that slows down is your boot up time. Comodo and Online Armor slowed my pc down and slowed my browsing down.
Not true, the highest level still let slip through many keylogging methods. OA free is a drama, it even starts freezing up the whole system, must be a crude and cruel low-level-hooking method that they use, because many executables freeze totally in some cases. They won the fight against RkUnhooker but not against system stability related to executables.
I just use Threatfire with ZAAS. TF is good at preventing many keyloggers and has promised to improve even more.
Vettetech. I'll stop posting about TF, if you stop posting about every firewall you decide to use. LOL. And what does your "no comment" mean Coolio10? That you think both me and Vettetech are crazy, or just me? LOL. To be honest though, right now I only have ZAAS and Avast Home installed. I'm waiting until the latest version of TF has been out for a few days to make sure there are no bugs. I have used TF with ZAAS without any problems or slowdowns before, but as I've been told by Vettetech many times. "You don't need ThreatFire" I may not even install it. LOL.
I'm a little confused. It was stated in the original post that ZAAS was just below OA and Comodo in Matousec's tests. What test are you referring to? The leak test results refer to ZA Pro. I see no mention there about ZAAS. Am I missing something? Thanks. Hugger
Since both ZA Pro and ZAAS have the same Triple Defense Firewall, I think that both whould fair the same in those leaktests. ZA Pro does offer a few more features though. Hope this helps.
Zone Alarm Pro and Zone Alarm Anti Spyware are the same. Also Zone Alarm Anti Virus is the same. They all have the same firewall protection its just that each one adds something. Zone Alarm free is different though. Any questions just look at the site. http://www.zonealarm.com/store/content/catalog/products/znalm/comparison.jsp
And if you look at the comparison you will see that not all of the product line is Vista ready and that the Suite has quite a few features shown as not available on the Vista version.
