Anybody have experience with Zone Alarm?

crimson · 21 Nov 2015

I got rid of Privatefirewall, and installed Zone Alarm.

I noticed that when I installed Privatefirewall, it would ask me to do everything for the first time. And I could set it to remember. Even if I was just saving a document. Zone Alarm doesn't seem to be doing this. It should be asking me for everything the first time I do it. But it seems to just let everything go. So I'm not sure if I truly have maximum protection. Especially if Windows wants to try to access the internet for dubious reasons.

Borg 386 · 21 Nov 2015

I don't have experience with ZA, but yes, that type of behavior would worry me also. I know some people have mentioned Zone Alarm is a "set & forget" type of firewall. The one you had before was apparently more watchful.

When dealing with firewalls, it's not out of the ordinary for them to ask you for an allowance of something that may be perceived as a threat if it's not in it's database.

If you like your firewalls to be highly configurable & have good security, then you may want to look into Comodo. I will mention that the amount of configurations can be a bit overwhelming to some people. You can look at the User Guide here to get a preview & decide if you want to try it.

Comodo Internet Security Help Guide

crimson · 22 Nov 2015

I finally got it working. There's a meter in the Application Control settings that can be set to manual. Sometimes though, I'm still not sure what to allow through. I didn't see it before because it just looked like a typical meter that was set to maxed. Yet the meter is off-manual-auto.

Borg 386 · 23 Nov 2015

crimson said:

I finally got it working. There's a meter in the Application Control settings that can be set to manual. Sometimes though, I'm still not sure what to allow through. I didn't see it before because it just looked like a typical meter that was set to maxed. Yet the meter is off-manual-auto.

Glad you got it sorted. Yeah, it's usually one little missed thing with some software.....I've had that happen before....

AWRosey · 24 Nov 2015

As an FYI, should you experience any issues with Windows 10, applications or your internet connection be sure to use the tray icon's options to "snooze firewall" and "snooze antivirus" and retest. 90% of the time my issues were caused by Zone Alarm conflicts. But I always forgot to do this easy check first and ended up spending a lot of time troubleshooting, uninstalling/reinstalling, etc.

I was a longtime (5 year) user of Zone Alarm and only recently changed to Bitdefender.