zone alarm uses more resources that Sygate, and is more problematic. Read the reviews at download.com and other locations.
or continuing reading past threads here at Wilders where you'll find many satisfied users of Zone Alarm without resource issues
Based on my own experience and not other's reviews, I found Sygate to be very cpu intensive compared to all other firewalls, and ram usage wasn't too good either, higher than ZA. I'm using ZA Plus 4.0 right now and much prefer it over Sygate Pro.
I used Zone Alarm Pro 5 and it brought my peppy pentium 4, 40 Gigs, 26 free and 512 RAM to the pace of a slug. It went to the recycle bin for some other poor soul.
Anyone really concerned about resources should be looking at either Kerio 2.15 or Jetico Personal Firewall. Both ZA and Sygate are huge by comparison.
I read several comments in a couple of other security forums and there was an issue with jetico that needed resolution? i didn't document it down and thus can't remember what it was but the forums were not recommending it at present.
Diver, the older versions of ZA are much better. Right now I'm using ZA Plus 4.0.146.029 and getting the following: cpu usage: 0% ram usage: vsmon service: 6 megs gui: 3 megs I wouldn't call that bad at all...
K- I keep forgetting there are all these old versions of ZA floating around. However, they can be hard to locate. I think only 4.5 is available from the official site.
Wills- The latest reles of Jetico appears to be free of any significant problems. However, some people do not like the user interface. I find it to be OK. You realaly have to try it to find out. If you have never used a rules based firewall before, it might not be a great choice as it is more difficult to comprehend than Kerio 2.15.
Yep, I've managed, by Googling, to find about 8 or 10 of them, going all the way back to 2.1. I've tried the newer 5.x versions and hate them. There's just way too many useless features that don't belong in a firewall in my opinion. And I've also noticed bugs and errors in the 5.x versions as well. I like 2.6.362 for a bare bones stateful firewall, and 4.0 Plus for a good stateful firewall without the extra garbage. The only thing they've got in 4.0 over 2.6 is basically component control. I don't even care if that's in there actually. Anyway, there are older versions around which are resource friendly and get the job done fine. Getting back to the original comparison between Sygate and ZA, I recall Sygate 5.5 using about 3% cpu just idling, and around 22 megs of ram. Compare that to 0% cpu usage in ZA and only 9 total megs of ram. Seems obvious to me which is lighter..
Zonealarm 2.6.362 was the last version I ran. It was or (is) a great firewall. I no longer run zonealarm or sygate. I ran sygate for about a year. Here is a link for some older versions of zonealarm. http://www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=zalarm
