Product: ZoneAlarm Pro Price: $39.95 (Receive $10 off by clicking this link) Company Info: ZoneLabs Editor Rating: 4 stars Download ZoneAlarm Pro

Pros
+ Provides back up defense that complements anti-virus and anti-spyware tools
+ Blocks incoming probes and attacks
+ Monitors outgoing network activity
+ "Panic" button lets you stop all internet communication in case of attack

Cons
- Needs initial "training" period to learn about your computer
- Pop-up alerts repeatedly appear for the same programs
- Constant 'nag' screens to purchase ZoneLabs' Anti-Virus product.

ZoneAlarm Review

ZoneAlarm is one of the premier firewall solutions for home and business computers. It provides a rock-solid backup defense against spyware, Trojans, and viruses. If you maintain sensitive data on your PC, are worried about internet intrusion, data theft, or even data loss, you should probably be running this software.

After an initial break-in period, the ZoneAlarm firewall will silently protect your computer against continual break-in attempts and other intrusions that anti-virus and anti-spyware programs don’t catch.

While the high-end version of ZoneAlarm (“ZoneAlarm Security Suite”) comes with a variety of other tools (anti-virus, anti-spam) designed to secure your computer, their real strength lies in their firewall offering – we recommend the base level product only (ZoneAlarm Pro).

Note: Firewall products protect against different threats than anti-spyware and anti-virus programs, and you should always run a firewall in addition to those other types of security products. Click here for more information about firewalls.

Installation and Configuration

Installation was straightforward on our Windows XP test machine and took less than 5 minutes.

Configuration on the other hand, is a bit more complex. Fortunately, firewall products are far easier to configure than they used to be. When you first run the program, ZoneAlarm kicks off a "configuration wizard" that asks you a few questions and will automatically configure the program in an optimal manner for most systems. We found the wizard to be a bit cumbersome and would like to see most of these questions removed from the next version of the program.

Among the questions the wizard asks are:

1. Do you want to share your security settings with ZoneLabs? – Although in theory this will help ZoneLabs create better products, we prefer to save our bandwidth, so we choose “no”. If you’re on DSL or a LAN, clicking “yes” won’t hurt you any.
2. Automatically configure the program using standard settings (AlertAdvisor)? – For sanity’s sake, we highly recommend you choose “Automatic”. Otherwise, you’ll have to spend a lot more time manually configuring your installation.
3. Turn on ZoneLab’s Antivirus? – We’ve not had good results with ZoneAlarm’s built-in antivirus program, so we prefer to leave it off.
4. Use ZoneAlarm’s built-in spam filter? – ZoneLabs has embedded MailFrontier’s Matador product into ZoneAlarm to provide spam filtering. While this is an ok product, there are better ones out there, so again, we choose “no”. If you aren’t using an anti-spam program already though, you should pick “yes”.
5. Turn on IM Security? – Definitely select “yes”
6. Turn on Web-filtering? – if you aren’t worried about kids surfing the internet, you should probably leave this off. It can slow down your browser.
7. Turn on Privacy Control? – This is built-in to most browsers these days, so leave it off.
8. Turn on Cache Cleaner? – Your choice. This will free up space on your computer and possibly make your browser run faster. We selected “yes”.

After answering these questions and re-booting your PC, you’re all done. Just a few minutes of work and you have now added a powerful layer of protection against internet threats to your computer.

Usability