I have been loyal to Zone Labs BUT...

Creatures of the Wild,

...unless you really enjoy playing around with a program, tinkering, what ever, and are really computer savy. I can not say this enough do not down load as a new firewall or upgrade to Zone Alarm 5.0 through 5.1. It seems to be unstable and full of bugs and has reach a bloat point that has damaged a good firewall. Been loyal since July 2001 do not even remember what version was in use then?

Hold to your old 4.5 version (like me) or get another firewall if you do not have one. I have been researching this since May. All these problems can not be newbies and/or over taxed systems causing problems. I still see what I believe are way to many people give it a try and then....
about the results. Wait for a more stable 5.xx or move on to the many good firewall solutions discussed in this forum.

If I am wrong I welcome comments. I play nice and do not get offended. Plez do not get personally. Thanks.

 

i did the upgrade and have not encountered any problems. just what kind of problems are u having?

 

Same here - no problems with the latest version of ZAFree.

 

None, I'm chicken. Which number do you have 5.1? It is getting better that is why I tried to be careful in what I said. It's to early to give up on them.

Mostly I hear about conflicts, slow downs, blue screens, error messages, will not download, will not install you name it.

 

Plenty of problems out there. I suggest you head over to the ZL forum. Granted the problems might be with the functionality tied into the paid versions of the product.

http://forum.zonelabs.org/zonelabs

Still not stable in my experience which is why I'm still @ 4.5. Couple issues I've run into... downloads won't initiate, couple BSODs that went away after it was uninstalled, large downloads stall, an occasional P2P issue, memory leaks, random system slowdowns not related to memory leaks, ad blocking is still not on par with NIS 2K3 which is over 2 years old and a host of other issues.

My guess is that they'll get it right when they hit 5.5 which is currently in Alpha testing.

 

Using 5.1. No problems.

 

I'm new here and I hope I'm not stepping on anyones toes, but I've had several issues with the latest ZoneAlarm.

When I installed on my laptop, PII 400MHz WIn98 SE, it completely wrecked my system. BSOD's out the wazoo. It automatically allowed OE, and many other programs to access the net. Which is a very poor practice in my opinion. To make matters worse, it failed to uninstall. Finally had to wipe my drive clean and reload everything to get rid of it.

I sent Zone Labs a very polite email explaining what I had experianced. Just so they would be aware of the situation. They responed with their standard email quoting that there is no technical support for the free version.

Made me real glad I didn't spend good money on their Plus or Pro version.