Customer Reviews

Zone Alarm Pro

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(18)

 

 

After reading the negative reviews regarding ZoneAlarm Pro 3, I must conclude that the majority of the individuals responsible for them either lack a basic understanding of firewalls, didn't know what they were doing, or experienced software conflicts resulting from multiple programs trying to do the same task at the same time!

It is important to realize that, by their very nature, every firewall is likely to block access to a legitimate website or program. This is not a bug, but rather the firewall doing its job - and doing it well.

If all you need is a basic yet powerful firewall, then by all means download the free ZoneAlarm from the Zone Labs website. You will not find a better deal anywhere.

For more comprehensive protection, consider upgrading to another ZoneAlarm product, or buying one of the firewalls offered by Norton or McAfee, for example.

In the case of ZoneAlarm, there are two "premium" versions available: ZoneAlarm Plus and ZoneAlarm Pro. Both offer enhanced protection against e-mail malware such as trojans, the ability to trace the origin of a hacker attack, and access to technical support via e-mail. The Pro version also offers Privacy Controls. Frankly, there's no good reason to spend $39.99 on ZoneAlarm Plus when you can own the Pro version for less money.

Those users running Norton Antivirus won't need the added e-mail protection offered by ZoneAlarm Pro. And discovering that someone in South Korea, France, Germany, Japan, Brazil or California is trying to access your computer is amusing, but the novelty of this feature wears off rather quickly. So the question becomes: Are the Privacy Control features worth the money? Maybe. ZoneAlarm Pro does a great job blocking annoying pop-up ads, but there are other programs that accomplish this as well. Yet, having a single program handling both firewall and privacy duties is desirable, as you avoid possible conflicts which might arise from multiple programs. By the way, having a pop-up killer running simultaneously with ZoneAlarm Pro's Privacy Controls is asking for trouble.

Setup for all versions of ZoneAlarm is painless and takes less than five minutes. If you opt for the Pro version, I suggest you turn the Privacy Controls off during the initial setup. This will enable you to identify any issues which might result from the firewall itself. Also, if you are running Windows XP, it might be a good idea to disable the operating system's native Internet Connection Firewall. (You can run ZoneAlarm along with a hardware firewall without problems, though). After you've had a chance to get familiar with the firewall and its features, set the Privacy Control settings to Medium, and see how things go.

With the Privacy Controls on, some websites might not display properly (e.g., animated e-greetings might not do anything!), or access is denied. You can easily customize a given website's privacy settings from the firewall's main control panel, though, so that only those sites you trust are allowed to place cookies on your PC or display pop-up and banner ads. Overall, ZoneAlarm Pro's Privacy Controls are useful and work as expected.

Support for ZoneAlarm Pro could be better, and this is the reason I am not awarding it five stars. In my experience, issues involving the firewall itself are addressed promptly and in a satisfactory manner. The same cannot be said about issues involving the Privacy Control functions. Thus, it is imperative that you take the time to learn how to customize settings for individual websites. Doing so will allow you to take care of most of the problems you might encounter in this area. Zone Labs knowledge base is helpful, but far from comprehensive. The help files are quite good, and you can also download a more detailed User's Manual from the Zone Labs website.

Regardless of the firewall you install, make sure to test it by visiting the Gibson Research Corporation's Shields Up!

Zone Alarm Pro (ZAPro) 3.0 offers mainly 5 things that the freeware Zone Alarm doesn't: (1) port configuration for each application, (2) cookie control, (3) ad banner blocking, (4) blocking of "mobile code" (i.e. scripts, applets, etc.), (5) "quarantining" of 46 e-mail attachment types.

No. (1) is probably the most noteworthy security addition, but its usefulness depends on the programs you run. It lets you explicitly specifies which TCP or UDP port(s) an application can or cannot use. In the free version, you can only allow an application to use either all or none of the ports (which, admittedly, is good enough for most applications). Some users may find it useful to allow certain ports, while also disallow other ones, that an application can use. For instance, if you run a mail server that offers POP3 and SMTP services, you may want to enable port 110 and 25 while disabling port 143, which is normally for IMAP service that is not always used by mail servers. Also, port configurations must be associated with an application. There is no "global" port configurations available in ZAPro. You are not able to configure a port for all applications. Before you can configure ports, you must add the application to the program list.

(2) and (4) are content-control features that let you control acceptance of cookies and active content. It lets you accept or refuse temporary or permanent cookies, and enable or disable "mobile code" -- scripts, embedded objects, and MIME-type integrated objects. One major plus is you can configure these settings for EACH WEB SITE, which is something you can't do in most browsers. For example, you can enable permanent cookies only for those web sites that require them to function properly; you can disable mobile code for sites that may use harmful scripts; you can set different cookie expiration times for different sites; and so on. There is a "site list" that shows the settings of every site. Every time you go to a new web site, its domain name appears on the site list, so you can modify its settings on the fly. Best of all, even third-party sites appear on the site list, which is useful in dealing with third-party advertising sites that force their way into your browsers (often in the form of pop-up ads).

Some reviewers wrote that ZAPro's ad-blocking feature doesn't work all the time, and pop-up ads are not often blocked. The truth is that advertisers use a variety of ways to create pop-up ads, and I suspect ZAPro's ad-blocking feature cannot catch them all. Some web pages use scripts to create pop-up ads, and you need to disable mobile code in ZAPro in order to block them. Some use cookies to "tell" the web page when to create pop-up ads, and you need to disable cookies. Therefore, you really need to configure DIFFERENT settings for different web sites in ZAPro to deal with them. As mentioned in the last paragraph, this is exactly what ZAPro lets you do.

ZAPro also has the so-called Advanced Mailsafe feature that "quarantines" e-mail attachments. Don't be fooled; this is a useless feature. All it does is RENAME the file extension of the attachments. An e-mail attachment named SETUP.EXE would be renamed to SETUP.ZLn (where n would be from 0 to 9). The problem is obvious: to truly prevent viruses coming out of an e-mail attachment, you need a VIRUS SCANNER. And ZAPro isn't one. Simply renaming the file doesn't solve the problem. Also, after the file is renamed, you are not told what the original file extension was, and you have to open up the ZA log to find out, which is inconvenient. This is poorly designed, poorly implemented feature.

Speaking of the ZA logs, be sure to back them up and read them regularly. They are text files that can be renamed to CSV files so you can import them to a worksheet or database for easier viewing. From the logs, find out which of your ports were probed most frequently, which ones were not probed AT ALL (perhaps ZAPro didn't detect any probe because the ports were WIDE OPEN!), which originating IP addresses have probed your machine the most often, etc. My logs from the last five months show that among the 4000-plus probes detected by ZAPro (which comes to about 20 a day), TCP port 1433 were probed 3000-plus times! (Port 1433 is normally used by Microsoft SQL Server. I do have a MS SQL Server, but it's behind the firewall and invisible from the internet. Also, the popular firewall-testing web site grc.com DOESN'T check port 1433.)

My conclusion is the ZAPro's additional feature are a mixed bag, and they don't justify the additional price.

One last thing is that even though the system requirements don't explicitly say so, ZA and ZAPro do run on Windows 95 (I tested it on OSR2).

I never thought about a firewall until I got a cable modem connection for the Internet. (Forgive me if I worded this wrong as I'm not a computer tech kind of person.) After reading an article in a PC magazine about keeping hackers out of your computer, I decided it was past time for a firewall. ZoneAlarm Pro 3 was recommended in the same PC magazine so I bought it. (I didn't download it from the Internet, I bought the boxed version.) I did worry if it would get along with my Norton Antivirus software and Norton Utilities that were already installed on my computer. No problem! They don't interfere with each other at all.

I love this software! It is easy to install and easy to understand for us novices. It also works - very well. I can't begin to count the number of times I have been "pinged" every time I go online. It blocks all attempts and tells me, in a pop-up window, the type of access attempt and the originating IP. It tells me when a program on my computer is trying to access the Internet. It has pop-up ad blocking, cookie control, hacker tracing, zone-based blocking and more. Without a firewall, you might be amazed at all the info the outside world can get to on your computer. Install ZoneAlarm Pro 3, and notice the difference in the test. With ZoneAlarm Pro 3 I passed these tests with flying colors!

Other reviews of this software listed here are less than complimentary and I don't understand why. I have never had any problems with ZoneAlarm Pro 3. Keep in mind, however, that I bought the boxed version, not the downloadable version; that may be the difference. This software comes with 1-year free online support. After that you have to pay for each additional year but you will need to do this in order to get the updates. Again, I recommend ZoneAlarm Pro 3 and please note that it is Windows XP compatible.

I bought the retail box, version 2, which included a free upgrade to version 3. Also, 12 months of free updates.

Within 15 minutes of installing it, I was being probed by
someone on the other side of the world.
Using the reverse lookup, I found out the location of the prober.

A little more research shows the people probing my pc were known
spamming websites/ISPs.

Another great feature was the outbound port blocking.
I found various programs that wanted to go out to the web and connect to websites, all on their own.
These were not simply programs with auto-update features.
(Who knows how much of my personal information was disclosed via spyware or theftware, prior to installing zone alarm pro).

So far, it's a great program.

I have been using Norton Personal Firewall 2001 since late 2000, and am generally happy with it. But since ZoneAlarm has been getting lots and lots of positive press coverage, I thought I should give it a try, esp. after my Norton LiveUpdate subscription expired.

I downloaded the free version of ZoneAlarm from Download.com. The same site also offers the full version for a limited-time trial. When you are at download.com, you'll notice that the full release (Pro 3) is recommended by only 1/3 of the user-reviewers. The free release (2.x) has a much higher approval rating.

Anyway, the installation of the free version (2.x) went well on my computer, and it didn't require a reboot of my Win2k system. I disabled Norton Personal Firewall 2001 to avoid any potential conflicts. The first 15 minutes of life with ZoneAlarm 2.x was good, as the program is very easy to configure and the interface is visually pleasing if a little bit confusing to computer newbies. (I consider myself a PC expert.)

However, when I came back from a 2-hour lunch break, I found my Internet connection (over cable modem) no longer alive. I had to reboot the computer to regain the connection. At first I thought it was just a fluke with my cable modem. But soon this happened again, in the middle of surfing the Web. And again. I disabled CookieCop 2 (a free privacy guarding utility from pcmag.com), but to no avail. I was baffled.

Recalling some of the negative comments regarding ZoneAlarm Pro 3 at download.com, I suspected ZoneAlarm 2.x was at fault. I exited the program, and sure enough, my Internet connection did not break... until the following day.

Eventually, I discovered that even when you exit ZoneAlarm, it still keeps a small monitoring program in the background, and only when you uninstall ZoneAlarm completely does that program get stopped. I did that, and my Internet connection has been trouble-free ever since.

I'm sure ZoneAlarm can be a good product. But after this rather unpleasant experience, I decided to stick with Norton's product and plan to upgrade later this year to the 2003 version. I'm glad I read the user reviews on download.com, or it would have taken longer to pinpoint what killed my Internet access.

So, before you purchase this product, try out the free version as well as the limited-time trial of the Pro version. Run it for at least two weeks before considering buying it.

I have used the free version for ages and have loved it. I decided to upgrade to PRO for the additional features.

I immediately browsed the same web sites on 2 computers sitting side by side. One had Zone Alarm and the other didn't. All the annoying pop-up ads disappeared on the Zone Alarm machine. What a relief.

I decided to subject it to the ultimate test. I went to an adult site and then closed the window. The un-protected machine immediately started opening all the other adult site windows. The Zone Alarm machine closed the window cleanly.

Anyone that has visited an adult site knows that it is next to impossible to close one adult window without 3 more opening up.

I am very satisfied.

I have to say that this is the worst piece of software I ever voluntarily installed on my computer. And...at times....I have thought it was worse than some of the junk you pick up on the internet. Everytime I shut down my computer, or turn of Zone Alarm, it comes up with an error message saying that certain files cannot be found. I have tried to uninstall it, but when you try to do that, you get the same message, only with different files, so it cannot be uninstalled the normal way. So I tried to uninstall it by manually removing all its components, by doing a search and then also by searching through the registry to remove it piece by piece. Needless to say I couldn't get it all.This software has its fingers in everything. So my only option has been to reinstall it everytime I shut it down or shut down my computer. Becase as one of the previous reviews says, it has an internet lock feature that will block you from accessing the internet if it is unable to assess certain risks. This continued to happen even after I thought I had it all the way removed, which is why I have to keep reinstalling it, because I cannot find all the components to remove them and keep this from happening.Even if you have this feature disabled, it still happens, and it is a major major major pain. I have had viruses that caused less problems than this.

You may be shopping around and comparing Norton Internet Security vs. Zone Alarm Pro but in a feature-to-feature comparision you would need to own the Pro version to compete with the Norton product.
Just to set the record straight (and in case you've seen any of my other reviews of Norton products), I have been using Peter Norton's (Symantec) products since the Norton Utilities v4.5 for DOS. Having said that, I do believe ZoneAlarm Pro has got the Norton version of the software-based firewall beat. It loads faster, takes up less memory and system resources, and has a lot more fine-tuning options available.
I would highly recommend Zone Alarm Pro based on several years experience in running it.

ZoneAlarm is one of the best firewall programs on the market. Compared to Norton it was unbelievable how many intrusions were caught. It works seamlessly and rarely messes up new installs or access to web sites.

Of course it depends on how you are going to set up ZoneAlarm.

As for the Pro version I agree with other reviewers, you do not get a lot more for the money and although I want to see these developers do well I can't see the need to purchase to more expansive package. Also, several of my friends warned me to pass on this version as they had problems with unexplained shut downs and difficulty disabling ZoneAlarm Pro 3. In fact, both went back to the free version.

Between ZoneAlarm and the (free) AVG anti-virus software except for automation there is no need for the commercial versions other than business licenses and more control. For home and casual users it's not worth the possible intrusions.

I purchased ZoneAlarm 3.0 and used it for approximately 1 month. It seemed to function OK at first but I soon began to experience frequent system lockups, loss of Web connection, and an inability to complete a shutdown. I suspect part of the problem lies with Windows ME and Internet Explorer. However, after undergoing the laborious uninstall process, including removing VSDATA95, the problems seem to have gone away. So I'm out [$] and still have no protection. Let the buyer beware indeed.