Zone Alarm Free Antivirus+Firewall 15.0

[rosendalek]

The First thing I notice about Zone Alarm, is they have kept the simplified interface . its 3 tabs, Antivirus/Firewall/Identity Protection, and inside each tab are simple options that show the status of each applicable component.

The Second thing I notice is they have improved their Anti-virus component, The Behaviour blocker is more effective then in version 14.0 and utilises application control, although their is no sandbox feature.

the 3rd thing is the effectiveness of the anti-virus component. using the Kaspersky engine its detection rate is top quality. and its on access protection is lightning fast at detecting threats running in realtime. However to get web threat and cloud protection you will need to upgrade to the paid edition or add a paid copy of zemana or malwarebytes premium to get the most out of it. but if you go down this route you might as well just buy Kaspersky Internet Security and get all the features and more at less of a cost to system memory usage.

Zone alarm creates 3 processes that I could visibly see:

za_tray.exe (Zone Alarm system tray icon and launcher: uses roughly 3-7mb
vsmon.exe (Zone Alarm internet security service) : uses about 300-450mb of ram
za_core.exe (zone alarm core service) : uses about 8mb of ram

So its very heavy. I did notice that when i turned the firewall off, vsmon.exe dropped to about 70mb, which indicates that The firewall and application control components are hogs. so if your using windows 8.1 or 10. you could just get away with using the antivirus component + Windows firewall.

 

[Unlocalized]

I prefer comodo, but thanks you.

 

[Sr. Normal 2.0]

@rosendalek Perfectly explained. The engine karpesky is not up to date. In MalwareHub we have seen as Karpesky detected what ZoneAlarm not.

It is a very good solution free, if you do not want to spend money on an excellent protection, you can always accompany ZoneAlarm from, for example, VoodooShield free, MBAE free as well as frequently use a demand scanner (Zemana, EEK or Malwarebytes).

Thanks for sharing this new launch.

@Unlocalized Hi friend. It is customary in this forum reason our responses.

 

[Solarlynx]

I used ZA FW free 14 and have good impression of it. Thanx for info about its development.

[USER=55980]@Unlocalized Hi friend. It is customary in this forum reason our responses.[/USER]

+

 

[Sundaram999]

Thanks for your review!!!

 

[FrFc1908]

thanks for your extensive review @rosendalek! I prefer comodo firewall over zonealarm because it is more customizable and offers more protection layers. combined with a free av ( 360 ts or avast free ) or the one firewall I use now ( emsisofts! )

 

[rosendalek]

firewall I use now ( emsisofts! )

I miss Emsisoft's online armour free

 

[rosendalek]

The engine karpesky is not up to date. In MalwareHub we have seen as Karpesky detected what ZoneAlarm not.

Yeah, I have a suspicion that its using an older engine , everything reminds me of the Kaspersky Antivirus 2008/09 engine

 

[jamescv7]

ZoneAlarm Free AV may considered underrated, where it can effective in other times however limited due to once a day signature basis.

Their firewall is indeed effective for unobtrusive matter.

 

[MiserableHumanBeing]

Back in the day (when I was using Avast ver 4.x) the ZoneAlarm firewall was a thing, it was actually really good with Avast 4.x. I miss those days.

LE: In Windows 7, at its peak, it uses about 280mb of RAM but it doesn't feel that heavy, compared to Bitdefender for example.

 

[Nico@FMA]

The First thing I notice about Zone Alarm, is they have kept the simplified interface . its 3 tabs, Antivirus/Firewall/Identity Protection, and inside each tab are simple options that show the status of each applicable component.

The Second thing I notice is they have improved their Anti-virus component, The Behaviour blocker is more effective then in version 14.0 and utilises application control, although their is no sandbox feature.

the 3rd thing is the effectiveness of the anti-virus component. using the Kaspersky engine its detection rate is top quality. and its on access protection is lightning fast at detecting threats running in realtime. However to get web threat and cloud protection you will need to upgrade to the paid edition or add a paid copy of zemana or malwarebytes premium to get the most out of it. but if you go down this route you might as well just buy Kaspersky Internet Security and get all the features and more at less of a cost to system memory usage.

Zone alarm creates 3 processes that I could visibly see:

za_tray.exe (Zone Alarm system tray icon and launcher: uses roughly 3-7mb
vsmon.exe (Zone Alarm internet security service) : uses about 300-450mb of ram
za_core.exe (zone alarm core service) : uses about 8mb of ram

So its very heavy. I did notice that when i turned the firewall off, vsmon.exe dropped to about 70mb, which indicates that The firewall and application control components are hogs. so if your using windows 8.1 or 10. you could just get away with using the antivirus component + Windows firewall.

Resource usage might be high and 300/450 is high enough. Yet one also needs to remember that 5/10 years ago the average PC did have 2/4GB ram and then losing 3/450mb of it is alot.
Yet nowadays the average PC has a far better multi-core CPU and usually anywhere between 8 and 32GB ram (the current pc i am on has 64GB ram) My point here is ZA is a feature rich program and it does use a pretty amount but the resource usage is not as high as it might seem, considering what i just said.
Some people are still stuck in the mind set to much resources, yet they do not understand that functions need resources and since resources generally increased 10 fold in the average PC/network why not use it.

 

[MiserableHumanBeing]

Tried it in a VM, it is far from a top product but they are moving in the right direction. They need to improve the UI (it's 2016 people!!!), improve the RAM usage and tweak the BB module(at least they have one, unlike some companies).

 

[Maziar Ansari]

norton is the best