Vista and Zonealarm free

chopster

Is the latest version of zonealarm free compatible with vista ?

8T8

There is no need to use Zonealarm with Vista it's built in Firewall is just as good unless their is something in particular in ZA you want (the Vista firewall can block outbound connections).

I do not believe ZA is compatible with Vista either & I would not touch a Vista compatible version of their program until a few revisions in as it will be riddled with bugs if history is any guide.

chopster

Hmm , will take a closer look at the vista firewall , just always thought that the windows firewall was always crap and very basic with zonealarm having served me well.

8T8

Well I know some who would see it as the other way round, ZA can be a flaky, unreliable program & I've had my fair share of problems with it.

The built in XP firewall is perfectly fine to use, the Vista version improves on this in fact if you are behind a NAT based router you don't even really need a software firewall.

Companies like ZoneLabs & a few others spread a little bit of fud in order for folks to install their free version as a means to up sell & peddle their commercial offerings.

Capt'n Midnight

8T8 wrote:

Well I know some who would see it as the other way round, ZA can be a flaky, unreliable program & I've had my fair share of problems with it.

I've had it crash far too often to trust it , and I'm not talking about the free version either.

You are better off with NAT on a router as your first line of defense than trusting to software only, that way you still have some protection regardless of what happens to the software.

It's early days yet, and much of the networking stack in VISTA is a re-write so can't tell yet how rock solid it is, but blocking outbound connections is a big improvement

chopster

Can the vista firewall flag an outgoing connection though like zonealarm does and asks for permission first . I can find the exceptions tab alright but that's having to manually block/disallow it in the list rather than auto notification that a certain program is trying to access the internet.

Thanks.

8T8

Vista’s firewall is still predominately rules based rather than per program based which is the one disappointing aspect of it. Though the average home user doesn’t really need this feature that much as if something has already gotten passed the systems protections you have bigger problems on your hands.

If you go into the control panel->administrative tools->Windows Firewall with Advanced Security you can set all sorts of various configurations for inbound & outbound connections. For example you can set it to block all outbound connections bar those programs you have created a rule for.

But doing that for every program can be tiresome however Vista does have a system to know what programs are “safe” and set the flags accordingly to allow outbound connections though I confess I do not know the details of how this works. This is why you don’t get prompted for some software and do for some as an example Apache, Azureus or UTorrent will require a prompt but Firefox or Steam will not.

I do not know exactly how it determines what but at a guess anything that that tries to establish a link for inbound connections is red flagged and you will get the prompt.

You can find more detailed topics of the firewall at this link.

If you want per program prompts for everything then I think you will need to use another firewall the only two I know of that are Vista compatible are Kaspersky’s Internet Security Suite and Microsoft’s OneCare suite which has a further upgraded version of the same Windows firewall.

Kaspersky is possibly make the best anti-virus software available so I would lean towards their product, OneCare is fine for the average Joe but it doesn’t have a lot in the way of advanced options. Oh yeah Kaspersky call their firewall Anti-Hacker as part of the suite just in case you are wondering looking at the site and not seeing firewall mentioned anywhere it is also sometimes referred to as KIS.

Chapter 12 of the KIS manual deals with the firewall so if you want to see if it has a feature you need you can check it out from their, a trial version is also available.