Who hit the alarm?. Review on Zonealarm Firewall

In a country like India where dial-up accounts is a ruling major choice of indian surfers firewalls like zone alarm doesnt seem to fit in the picture.Zone Alarm is too expensive for the indian market and a average internet user.Firewalls are only meet the needs of security of broadband users,ISDN,DSL and servers which stay online more than 4-5 hours.If you have Windows 2000 and keep your system up to date with Windows Update, Zone Alarm not only does not work, but it halts all your programs and Windows until you can get it uninstalled. Their own user board confirms that they are aware of the problem but do not know how to fix it. It looks pretty and I'm sure it might be a nice piece of software, but give me a break! Firewall software that forces you to choose between having security gaps in your programs or having thier firewall is no choice at all. The new rules require a degree in networking. After a couple of days of p2p activity ZA4 was using over 50% of cpu and consuming over 100mb of RAM & VM, each. Shutting down ZA was the only way to free it back up. This has been a problem for quite a while.

However on the other side Zone Alarm is very easy to install and setup. Blocks about 99% of all hackers, cookies etc. Everything in this program is easy to opperate by just a click of a button or a slider bar. Password protection of your settings assure no tampering of your firewall. Detailed information of what was blocked with program descriptions and icons. Stops webbugs cold, pop-up ads, junk cookies and etc.

In the end I just want to mention that ZAPro is for servers, not home users. Power users will be dissappointed. Once they set it up, they can forget its there.