On 30 Dec 2005 at 11:18, Bill Hatcher wrote: > Since I had dumped McAfee several years before, I went looking for a > replacement AV/Firewall program and ended up, like you, with AVG7 (free) and > Zone Alarm Firewall, also free, and have been running both on 6 machines for > 2 years with no problems at all. > > I know many people still swear by McAfee and Symantec products, but I am in > that growing group which swears AT them!
Wholeheartedly agree, had a client recently that bought two hp laptops with xp home, identical machines, one was to be upgraded to xp pro (retail upgrade) while the other stayed as xp home. Both came with 60 trial of NIS2k5 or 2k6. Did all the windows updates etc, both machines got slowed way down (especially on shutdown) and lots of stuff didn't work, included itunes wouldn't run, the office 2003 trial hung half way through install, then once installed couldn't download any email, installed ms antisypware and it would hang etc. On the upgraded machine everything worked until I installed ms antispyware and it also hung. Uninstalled NIS on both machines, everything worked again. I went through all the troubleshooting steps from symantec, manually and automatically reset the rules, created application specific allow rules etc, no joy. I cursed Symantec's name worse than I ever have. About 6-8 months ago I started replacing NIS with Zone Alarm Security Suite, lightweight (compared to NIS) and usually works great, that was until they added the OSF (os firewall) feature in the 6.x series, now the darn thing pops up an alert every 5 seconds with so much info, it's hard to know whether to accept or deny the popup. I mean it even pops up with standard windows services, when you are installing software etc. As far as I'm concerned the ZoneLabs folks should have done their homework and either pre-okayed lots of this stuff or made certain the "more info" button has useful info so you can decide whether to allow or block. I've been running NAV2k3 and ZAP and ZASS on several of my machines for years now, however once they expire I'll be going to Trend Micro's PC-Cillin Internet Security 2006. Lightweight, full featured, fast, simple etc. It's what a security suite should be. I've been VERY impressed with it. Plus for a home office, it allows you manage all the other installations of the software from one computer. In the office and enterprise environments, I use Trend's Client Server Messaging Security Suite for SMB, works great. > Welcome to the light side! ;) Indeed!!!! -- Harondel J. Sibble Sibble Computer Consulting Creating solutions for the small business and home computer user. [EMAIL PROTECTED] (use pgp keyid 0x3AD5C11D) http://www.pdscc.com (604) 739-3709 (voice/fax) (604) 686-2253 (pager) -- ---------------------------------------- To Change your email Address for this list, send the following message: CHANGE WIN-HOME your_old_address your_new_address to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Note carefully that both old and new addresses are required.
