USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20011201.1000 (Crew, this is the Captain): Aaron writes:

I remember a while ago you posted that you had bought a copy of ZoneAlarm
Pro, and said that you might write a review. If it's not too much trouble,
would you mind writing that review? I may need such a product soon, and I'm
interested in your opinion.

Sorry about that; been kind of busy lately. (There's a war on, hadn't you noticed? ) Anyhoo, having gotten fed up with Norton Internet Security blue-screening Win2K on me about once every two weeks, I did switch over to ZoneAlarm Pro a couple of months ago. This won't be an in-depth review, but rather just a collection of impressions. Overall I like it a lot and intend to keep using it, and have no qualms about recommending it.

The good? It is very reliable. Not a single crash; not even a hiccup. Not only does it not blue-screen Win2K, but it never even hangs up. It is relatively unobtrusive, and by all accounts its security is very good. It's low-maintenance; after a few days of using it, it hardly nags me at all.

The bad? It's a bit spartan. It doesn't have the kind of logging I took for granted with NIS (which kept track of everything that happened in or out in a rotating 2M file), so it's a bit hard to go back and find out what's been going on recently. Its configurability is a bit less powerful. It's possible to block individual web sites, but you have to hunt to find it. (Security->Advanced->Restricted Zone) And by itself it isn't anything like as powerful as NIS.

But working with AdSubtract Pro, which I also have, the two compliment each other nicely, and in most ways the combination of the two is actually better than NIS. AdSubtrace Pro does have logging (though not as good), but on the other hand it is actually better at some things. In particular, NIS claims to be able to block popups but in fact many creep through. AdSubtract Pro really gets them all. Its user configurable ad blocking is a bit less flexible, but its built-in blocking is already so good that I don't feel as much need to mess with it as I did. The one really big drawback of AdSubtract Pro is that you don't have access to the built-in rules or the ability to override them.

There are sometimes when you need to access a web site without the protection, for any of several reasons. One of the nice aspects of AdSubtract Pro is that you can disable it temporarily by clicking its icon in the tray. With NIS you had to call its window to disable it, and for reasons which were never clear it took several seconds to turn off.

I really like NIS on Win 98 and its kin. That's a modified version of the old AtGuard program, which was a prize. The difficulty with NIS came when they moved it to Win2K, because Symantec's engineers didn't do a very good job of it. ZoneAlarm Pro and AdSubtract Pro, on the other hand, work beautifully in the Win2K environment -- and on WinXP. These programs get the USS Clueless seal of approval. (discuss)