>>> what do you think about Zone Alarm?
I've really taken the new Zone Alarm Suite through its paces, setting it up on 8 computers. Overall I give it an "A-" (rounds out to 5 stars), because of its ease of use, it's ability to scan for both viruses and malware, and of course, it's firewall capabilities.
The minus comes from 2 problems that I encountered in the past week:
--ZASuite did catch a pesky "Downloader" virus that somehow got onto a computer where I was upgrading a new C: boot hard drive. Unfortunately, even though ZASuite deleted the virus, it failed to prevent the virus from making the new drive unbootable, requiring me to do a lengthy Win XP repair installation with subsequent reinstallation of all SP1 and SP2 WinXP updates.
--On another computer ZASuite was incompatable with the environment softwares, causing the computer to continuously crash every 5 minutes. I had to go back to AVG+AdAware2007.
Thus I'm now using it as the primary firewall and virus/other malware solution for 7/8 computers... not bad at all.
BTW, on one computer hard drive that was also hit by this Downloader virus, the "My Documents" folder was locked and seemed impenetrable. For this I used a software called "FinalData Standard" for the first time. WOW!!! It found and enabled each and every file (about 3000) and allowed me to copy them to a new folder. Impressive. Cost: ~$40. (URL:
http://www.windowsmarketplace.com/details.aspx?itemid=3394445 )
