Zone Alarm Vista

[kartel]

Finally...........

http://download.zonelabs.com/bin/free/beta/index.html

Edited April 7, 2007 by kartel

[kartel]

What what a bloated piece of software.

I uninstalled ZoneAlarm and my system restore croaked, BEWARE.

Edited April 9, 2007 by kartel

[MIKE MANE 60]

Yes, have got to agree with you on this one. Installed it and for a period of time there I thought I was running Windows ME (Yep I was the one who bought it !) Quite nostalgic but not good. Opening up "Task Manager" brought visions of Disney like characters running around trying to achieve something, but they were not quite sure what it was. Tried their latest one on XP with the same results, so I dont think it is just a "Beta" thing.

Prefer to stay paranoid about viruses/spyware etc; than use this at the moment. Perhaps it gets better, but as you say - bloated - is the operative word here.

[spacesurfer]

what's a good firewall for vista? i haven't seen any for vista yet.

[Eck]

Vista comes with a fully in and out Firewall. However only the in part is activated by default. During the beta period of Vista I just leaved it alone and used Avast or AVG for a virus scanner and Spybot S & S and Ad-Aware for the spyware scanning.

There are instructions around for activating the advanced outbound features of the built in firewall, but I wasn't thrilled with how complex the configuration of programs with it worked.

Fortunately I subscribe to McAfee VirusScan which is now compatible with Vista. The Firewall, once installed, disables the built in Vista firewall in favor of the McAfee Personal Firewall Plus that is now included in VirusScan.

Although the McAfee firewall is easily configured, actually no configuration is necessary if you just keep things at the default settings. McAfee has a Smart Recommendations function that automatically grants programs it is aware of full in and out access. For those it is not aware of it will pop up a message asking you if you want to grant a new program access to the internet the first time that program tries to do so. Very easy. If you know the program you can click Allow, if you aren't certain you can click Only This Time and it will ask you again the next time, and if you know you don't want to allow the program you can just select Don't Allow. If you want total control then you just change from the default Normal setting to Stealth. Then it works about the same as ZoneAlarm. You get questioned for every process and program and have to decide whether you want in, out, etc. Normal works fine as long as you trust the programs it doesn't know about and you grant that program access. Be sure about that because it will give anything you allow both in and out access!

I've tested it in Shields Up and unlike the Vista Firewall it got a perfect rating!

So for me McAfee is a good choice.

I do change some of the McAfee defaults. For example I delete the Defragment Hard Drive and QuickClean items in the McAfee Scheduler properties. If I want to do those things I'll do them myself. And I also uncheck Scan on a schedule in the VirusScan options so that the thing won't just automatically start a scan. When I want to scan I'll run it myself. I even turned off the Vista option when opening Disk Defragmenter that has it run on a schedule. Although Vista has a smart defragmenter that can run in the background, I'd still rather disconnect from the internet, turn off everything, and run the defrag myself since it goes a lot quicker that way and less files are in use so it can defrag more files.

The free McAfee Site Advisor browser plugin is also part of the package. I updated to the purchase version so I also get the protected mode where it won't allow going to known bad sites unless you turn it off.

Oh! McAfee totally turns off Windows Defender. There are compatibility problems between Windows Defender and McAfee. But you're better off with McAfee which includes the spyware background scanning and SystemGuard, which monitors even more of the important registry settings than Windows Defender would, such as startup processes, etc.

It's still good to use Spybot Search & Destroy and Ad-Aware though. Those scan and remove more forms of spyware than McAfee does. As long as you don't use Tea-Timer or the background pay for options of Ad-Aware there is no compatibility problem between them and McAfee.

[kartel]

http://www.sphinx-soft.com/Vista/order.htm...FirewallControl

I use this since vista firewall dont do anything.

ZA was good at 4.5 I used it on 98se but 98se seems to be getting sabotaged, so I put it away for now on a HD.

[N1K]

I recently started with the testing of Eset Smart Security 3.0.128.0, which is currently in Beta stage. Eset Smart Security firewall isn't so good as ZA's one, but it sure is better than Vista's integrated firewall and it's serving it's purpose very well with some few exceptions, after all it is still in Beta..

I've posted the news article here where you can find links for downloading and registering for a beta testing program.