Firewalls

I’ve just tried Zone Alarm as Norton is simply hogging too many resources.

It’s a great little (free!) app, and ideal for what most home users would want. One caveat though if your looking at using it on an IMAP connection – every time a message comes in or you synchronise your folders (as I do frequently) and I presume you wouldn’t be using IMAP if you only had one PC… then all messages are downloaded, not just the headers. This is fine if you don’t have large attachments, but when you’ve been away from your PC for a while or using a different PC mainly and want a quick check from a secondary machine this is quite annoying as Outlook freezes while Zone Alarm does its stuff.

For the general home user though I’d highly recommend it and suggest paying for the all singing all dancing version. Its cheap and doesn’t slow your PC down half as much as Norton or McAfee do. Additionally, the ‘challenge’ aspect of the email filtering is very useful. You can buy this in various forms from many vendors, but since it’s integrated into Zone Alarm makes this a much more seamless inclusion.

Verdict – A definite for home users, go for Norton if you’re a corporate client (the interface on McAfee is second only to your new bourn child’s first attempt at mummy and daddy).