Zone Alarm Woes

Do u have Zone Alarm Firewall on your PC

  • No because i dont need it

    Votes: 4 57.1%

  • Used to but then it gave me problems

    Votes: 2 28.6%

  • yes i have it and love it

    Votes: 1 14.3%

  • yes i have it but its not doing too good

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Total voters
    7
  • Poll closed .
T

thomasbuonoman

Geek Trainee
I have just recently installed Zone Alarm Free.

I have The following settings for it:
Internet Firewall- High
Trusted Zone Firewall- Off
Program Control- Low
Automatic Lock- When Screen saver activates
Advanced Settings under Firewall- Only disable wind. firewall is checked
Email Protection- On
IP Range Set to Allow all computers on Network in and out

This software is truly great but the only problem ive been having is it seems to stop videos from loading. Im using Mozilla 2.0.0.4. along with Google Web Accelerator. When i go to youtube, videos will load (by load i mean the red bar moves) up to say about 2 minutes then stops. The same thing with myspace, the video downloads up to a certain point and then just stops. I have tried disabling Google Web Accelerator and then restarting firefox and nothing. I also tried moving the firewall meter down to medium and still nothing. Before i installed ZA, the videos downloaded fine. The weird thing is, on youtube the videos seem to download, not fast but they still do once in a blue moon, and i mean like 1 out of 20 videos. The ones that do make it have no relation to each other, other than there short. I have also tried just watching the videos in IE and it seem almost worse, the videos on youtube download alot slower and stop alot earlier. Idk what the problem is and any suggestions would be great. And id rather do anything but un-install because of how great this software is.
 
well, id rather not buy it. This free thing seems to be working except for that problem. My windows installs never last too long anyways because i abuse it with all my registry changes and programs and new hardware and what not so i dont see buying one time software as a good investment. Also the weird thing is, half the time the free programs out perform the cost ones.
 
The best firewalls I've ever had have been paid ones, I paid for a year of BitDefender, which did my firewall and antivirus needs far better than ZoneAlarm ever did. After that year I switched to BlackICE and have never looked back, I haven't had a single problem with that as my firewall and AVG Free Edition as my anti-virus. I've often found that firewalls are one of the few free things that is better off being bought rather than downloaded for free.
 
I've used ZoneAlarm for a while. It was good, but had many system threads opened and used about 100 megs of RAM on my machine. That's way too much. I like PC-Cillin 2007 and Ashampoo Firewall.
 
thats what i like to here, free. The thing that bothers me is i turned off the firewall, turned mozilla back on and youtube still stopped loading like half way through the video.
 
Try to find an older version of Sygate, It IS the best Free you can get.
The version would be I beleive 5.5 , If you can't find it , then let me know..
 
Update:
Thank u guys, this is why i love this site. I uninstalled zone alarm and then left it alone and that was the youtube problem. I tried Sygate and it wasnt advanced enough for me so then i tried Ashampoo and its awesome. Easy to use and it doesnt seem to affect youtube. So for now im protected by over 7 Anti-Virus/Spyware programs and now a decent firewall. Again, thank u
I LOVE FREE SOFTWARE!!!

Current Setup:
Ad-Aware
Spybot
Norton Anti-Virus 2006
Ashampoo Firewall
AVG Free 7.5
Yahoo Anti-Spy
Windows Defender
Trojan Remover (scans at startup)

It may take a full minute to get all my startup programs (21 programs) running and only have an average 300MB free of RAM but hey its worth it :)
 
Although you've found a solution now I'd like to recommend another option. Instead of draining system resources with a software firewall you could buy a hardware router with a built-in firewall. They are generally much better and give you more control over what is and isn't allowed on your network.
 
thanks for the option but im gonna stick with the software firewall. It actually doesnt even seem to touch the CPU usage and RAM, cant really tell because i have so many background programs running, but haven't noticed a change. Also with this i feel like i have more direct control and its very easy. If this fails i might consider that but unless they have some feature that is way better than a soft. firewall, i think ill keep this one. Thanks for the idea though, i never thought of that.
 
I would test that firewall too see if it will pass the Shields up test..
test it at Gibson Research, shields up Port test, and see how it does.
Plus I see you are running AVG and Norton ? Why ? You only need one.
 
Thanks but im gonna stick with Ashampoo Firewall, it seems to be doing great, i did that Gibson, the all ports and common ports and it says all my ports are stealthed. As for why i have AVG + Norton, its because im paranoid and they both have good and bads. Norton is overall great except for email scanning and Real Time Protection. AVG is good at both those things.
And can anyone recommend a program that block your IP address from view, i went to this test website, clicked on test IP seceurity, and BAM!!! it told me where i lived, my internet provider and thats scary. I would also rather not use a search engine and i would like it to be free

Results From Gibson

Shields UP! is checking YOUR computer's Internet
connection security . . . currently located at IP:

24.250.31.254


Please Stand By. . .

Attempting connection to your computer. . .
Shields UP! is now attempting to contact the Hidden Internet Server within your PC. It is likely that no one has told you that your own personal computer may now be functioning as an Internet Server with neither your knowledge nor your permission. And that it may be serving up all or many of your personal files for reading, writing, modification and even deletion by anyone, anywhere, on the Internet!
Your Internet port 139 does not appear to exist!
One or more ports on this system are operating in FULL STEALTH MODE! Standard Internet behavior requires port connection attempts to be answered with a success or refusal response. Therefore, only an attempt to connect to a nonexistent computer results in no response of either kind. But YOUR computer has DELIBERATELY CHOSEN NOT TO RESPOND (that's very cool!) which represents advanced computer and port stealthing capabilities. A machine configured in this fashion is well hardened to Internet NetBIOS attack and intrusion.
Unable to connect with NetBIOS to your computer.
All attempts to get any information from your computer have FAILED. (This is very uncommon for a Windows networking-based PC.) Relative to vulnerabilities from Windows networking, this computer appears to be VERY SECURE since it is NOT exposing ANY of its internal NetBIOS networking protocol over the Internet.

Common Ports:

GRC Port Authority Report created on UTC: 2007-07-23 at 01:23:48

Results from scan of ports: 0, 21-23, 25, 79, 80, 110, 113,
119, 135, 139, 143, 389, 443, 445,
1002, 1024-1030, 1720, 5000

0 Ports Open
0 Ports Closed
26 Ports Stealth
---------------------
26 Ports Tested

ALL PORTS tested were found to be: STEALTH.

TruStealth: PASSED - ALL tested ports were STEALTH,
- NO unsolicited packets were received,
- NO Ping reply (ICMP Echo) was received.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

All Port Scan

GRC Port Authority Report created on UTC: 2007-07-23 at 01:25:34

Results from scan of ports: 0-1055

0 Ports Open
0 Ports Closed
1056 Ports Stealth
---------------------
1056 Ports Tested

ALL PORTS tested were found to be: STEALTH.

TruStealth: PASSED - ALL tested ports were STEALTH,
- NO unsolicited packets were received,
- NO Ping reply (ICMP Echo) was received.

So i think im doing pretty good
 
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