Beware of ZoneAlarm 5

I’ve been relying on my router’s hardware firewall for complete coverage this past year but recently decided that adding ZoneAlarm’s protection on top of it would be a good idea. I like to be able to open ports on the router for gaming and other applications. However, if you enable port forwarding but don’t run a software firewall on your machine, you are asking for trouble.

I’m a critic of Window’s software firewall built into XP. It is very difficult to customize and you can’t enable access permissions based on program usage. ZoneAlarm is my program of choice because it focuses on program permissions instead of port management. I use the hardware firewall to manage my ports and ZoneAlarm to protect forwarded ports when they are not in use.

However, you have to be careful what version of ZoneAlarm you run. Currently, ZoneAlarm 5 is a buggy piece of software that will crash your machine and slow your Internet connection to a crawl. This happened to me with both the free and Pro versions. When I rolled back to version 4.5, the problems went away.

ZoneAlarm is a great piece of software, but just make sure you install 4.5 instead of the current release. I’m sure Zone Labs will fix version 5 in the near future, but for now be sure to avoid it.