is the free zone alarm any good?

cheers Mem - the thing is the install should have led me thru any config that needed doing -it didn't - it just took over and sat there acting dumb and jerking my chain expecting me to do the work of diagnosing what had happened and what to do next. there may well have been a simple answer or there might have been conflicts going on - yes i've lost outbound protection for the moment but at least i can logon without any hassle - i use the computer to surf - i need some security to protect that - but i don't want to have to spend all my time debugging apps that don't appear to be doing what they should be doing or expecting me to guess what they are up to. hopefully as my knowledge of pc internals grows i may get to the stage where i feel confident to try again with another firewall until then i will just have to stick with what works even if it ain't 100%.

 

thanks for the links Tom - as Clinton once said about the economy KISS - keep it simple stupid - being relatively stupid when it comes to outwitting firewalls i want a very simple firewall that does a very simple job - it doesn't block anything without giving a reason why and an option to override and it shuts down when it's suppose to - XP Firewall is 50% the way there - now if MS could just add a teensy bit of outbound protection without screwing the whole deal i would be happy (why didn't they do it in the first place? why only go half way? they always seem to do things in half measures?)

 

Tracks, what do you mean by this? Were you referring to the paid pro version?

I've only looked at the new ZA6 Pro (paid) and that has a triple defense firewall that does monitor application behaviour but I believe the free version still just does 'standard' outbound protection i.e. it will prompt you to allow or disallow outbound access, but won't alert for suspicious activity like the new Pro triple defense version will.

 

i'm fairly sure the free 6.0 also has the triple layer defense.

 

Nope, it doesn't...

 

Tiny isn't easy to learn, but that is it because it covers Windows process, file and registry access along with network access - so properly set up it can provide far more protection than any other firewall (though adding the likes of Process Guard and RegDefend to the mix would level the playing field somewhat).

As for Outpost Free, yes it is dated and pretty poor for leaktest performance by current standards. The Pro version is a very different matter though.

 

No sorry i was wrong, i just checked! only that paid version has the new technology.....

 

I still have tiny 4.5 and a license. Tried it once and locked myself out of my own computer. I couldn't access anything, including Tiny, to try and fix whatever I did. Finally, I had to reformat and start over. That cured me from messing with Tiny.

Prior to XP, I used Tiny 2xx free and loved it. It won't work on my XP sp2 machine. I'm now (this week) playing with McAfee 6.1.6144 and am pretty happy with it.

Some day, I plan to reinstall tiny 4.5 when I'm really brave and daring and try to figure it out. It's rocket science to me at this point.

 

A bit off topic, but since there has been more than one reference to the paid versions.....

I keep seeing this phrase "alert for suspicious activity", this has to be kept in perspective, for example, an app invoking Notepad is not necessarily suspicious, it only means that it may be using Notepad to write to an error log.

Ran across this post at the ZL forums about the misleading lanquage used by ZL http://forum.zonelabs.org/zonelabs/board/message?board.id=win_za_msgs&message.id=10068#M10068

Those that use a process firewall like PG know how to handle this, but that's a tiny minorty of users.

Regards - Charles

 

ZoneAlarm Free is good enough for me and it's ready to protect me after the installation and that makes a firewall USERFRIENDLY for those, who aren't able to use a rule-based firewall.
I don't want the very best, because I can't handle the very best and I'm not willing to learn it because security is neither my job, nor hobby.
The BIG MESS in the security world isn't attractive either for me to get even interested in details.
Frankly, I never saw a group of softwares with so many SINS against the basic rules of information technology, than security softwares. Any good analyst and programmer will tell you that.
So I'm waiting ... for a sensational solution that cleans the actual big mess forever and I'm confident that this will ever happen. It is just a matter of having brilliant new ideas and only good ideas make history.
Definition-based solutions are out-of-date. It's high time to get some new ideas for the future and each security company that tries to change the future has my sympathy.