Zone Alarm: the good, the bad and the ugly
Zone Alarm is a free firewall program that also comes with advanced features for those who wish to opt for them. Like most antivirus programs, Zone Alarm has also grown with each new version. One of the best-known features of Zone Alarm is that it prompts the user for permission each time the computer accesses a new site, ensuring that you have the freedom to select or deny the site in terms of your preferences.
This feature can sometimes cause annoyance, especially when you’re working on something important, or if you don’t want to be interrupted while playing a computer game. Undoubtedly, many users have been frustrated and hampered by older versions of the program causing periodic interruptions. Consequently, one of the latest versions of Zone Alarm offers the option to automatically select or reject alerts in the program’s ‘Game Mode’.
Apart from Zone Alarm Firewall, Zone Alarm Security Suite 7 is another option for the average user. This program installs quickly and uninstalls just as easily when you need to remove it. Although it has the downside of not having any backup or recovery options, Zone Alarm Security Suite 7 is a viable option for online protection as it is well known for its virtually intuitive ‘learning’ feature that allows the program to understand your preferences in terms of how often it asks if you want to continue on a particular website.
Also, the uninstall feature is an added benefit that you don’t get with programs like Norton. Although it may seem like a small detail, not being able to uninstall an antivirus program can cause several annoyances, the minor ones being problems such as the program that regularly asks you to update, and other more important ones, such as the old program interfering with a new one that you can choose. to be installed on your system.
Zone Labs has also been praised for the much appreciated machine learning feature available in Zone Alarm, which allows users to customize their systems according to their particular preferences. Since it also offers protection against identity theft, Zone Alarm is undoubtedly one of the best protection programs available online. Users also have the flexibility to have their credit card details and other financial information monitored through an online system in real time, and alerts are sent to them when suspicious activity is detected. Zone Alarm can also help you stop getting hard copies of junk and spam in your regular mail.
One area in which users have found the Zone Alarm a bit questionable is its method of identifying trustworthy sites. Unlike programs like AVG, which use their own toolbars to monitor the security of a visited website, Zone Alarm uses a database of “trusted” sites that the user can determine and control. While this may give some users a sense of flexibility and control over their antivirus systems, others would undoubtedly like a more conventional protection system that uses built-in resources and updates to protect the computer from malicious attacks.
