How effective is ZoneAlarm Free Antivirus with Firewall 2013?

I'm using ZoneAlarm FW with Avast free for about a month now without any issues or slowdowns.4 GB RAM here too.And btw,the FW is using about 35-40 megs of RAM,unlike the whole suite which from my personal experience is using 200+ of RAM,but without any slowdowns at all.

 

Any nagware with zonealarm free.?

 

No nagware at all.

 

I've been using just the free firewall and it doesn't have any noticeable impact on performance. I haven't tried adding in the AV yet.

 

Its not to bad at all. The thing I don't like is that they force you to change your start page and default search engine in order to install it.

 

No, you can skip it at install

 

No you can't.If you don't check those boxes,the NEXT button is grayed out and the installation cannot continue.

Changed them back after the installation,no harm done.

 

Yes, you can...see picture
https://www.zonealarm.com/forums/sh...-box-and-default-home-page-choices-to-install

 

That "skip all offers" feature wasn't active some months ago as far as i remember.Just tried it now to install and yes,you can opt out by clicking on that feature.

 

Good to hear

 

Have you already tried the AV?

 

AV feels sluggish. It's Kaspersky. Can't deny it has good detection though. But i don't like it because of the awful thirsty firewall...

 

My ZAESS is expiring now and i can't afford to buy a new license . I might be switching to the free version as i really liked it a lot while i had it . to me the really tough part is the price . It is too much . While the free version is perfectly fine even with the once-per-day update.I can manually do it and it does not hurt to do so. As far as heavy i really do not find it so heavy ( or heavier than KIS or TREND McAffe or anything like that.)

 

Been having weird experiences with ZA Free: couldn't do a context-menu scan while the program is updating (it appears grayed out, on-demand scan from the program gui works though), nor while another on-demand scan is already running

Apart from those problems everything about it seems to good to be free IMO

 

Perhaps Fax will weigh in on this, but it seems to me that temporarily disabling scanning during updating is appropriate behavior and not weird. Also, why would you expect to be able to initiate a second scan while one is already running?

 

Yes, normal and by design

 

Like, when I boot into Windows ZA will try to update (normal behavior), if I plug in a flash drive during that moment, I'll have to wait for the update to finish before being able to scan it with ZA. It might took much longer if my computer didn't connect to the Internet at that time, since canceling the updater will take a while.

If ZA is scanning a flash drive when I plug a second one in, I'll have to wait for the first scan to finish (which will take quite long if the drive is too large / contains lots of archives) to scan it. Being able to do as many contextual scans as you wish should be the normal behavior here IMO.

 

I second that, multitasking should be no problem in 2013.

 

Like you I prefer vendors who participate in the AV Comparatives tests.

ZA is not the only one not participating, Symantic (Norton) also does not participate. AV Comparatives will not test a product if the vendor tries to control the results by cherry picking which tests they will take.

 

Well I tried it on a win 7 ultimate 64bit and its browser protection or download protection only worked with IE and my palemoon was un-protected. Anyway I tried downloading a file in IE10 and the zonealarm download manager quickly flashed and then was gone? no scanning message or I guess it did not work? maybe because it is 64bit. I uninstalled it.

A lot of security products do not go beyond IE, Firefox, Chrome and Opera protection. They do not provide protection for other browsers.

The only one I find that has almost all browsers or a-lot of them was kingsoft antivirus 5.6 and that program is dead now.

 

Regardless the browser used, the AV engine (this is valid for any product)will always protect you "on access". With ZAfree+AV you also have the protection of the HIPS module.

BTW, there is always a message if something is blocked and ZA is perfectly compatible with 64bit. Two scenarios: probably the download in IE10 got interrupted or it simply completed successfully then the ZA dialog box closes automatically without warnings (check the default download location - i.e. download folder).

 

I am running MBAM Pro and Zonealarm Antivirus +Firewall on Win. 7x64 home premium Sp1 with no problems at all.

 

I'm glad I stopped by here and checked out this thread. I am definitely going to check out this av and firewall. I have had real good luck with kaspersky in the past.

 

Just installed this recently and it seems very light compared to many of the others.. So far, pretty good. I don't know that I need the firewall much, but it's a nice way to get a good AV for free..

 

Seems like mostly positive feedback in this thread...

PCMag gave it 3/5 in February and on majorgeeks.com it's averaging 2/5 with 99 votes in at the time of writing, although some of that may be due to a negative reaction to the ads and extras (homepage/search engine changes).

I wasn't even going to try this suite, but I dunno. Guess I could install it in a VM and see what happens. I've been testing various AV/FW combinations recently because I need to change away from Comodo Insternet Security 5. I like ZA firewall a lot and it's also received exellent reviews everywhere. It also runs very light with MSE on a virtual machine.