While the independent antivirus testing labs heap honors on Kaspersky, those honors don't automatically carry over to ZoneAlarm. The labs make it very clear that results apply only to the actual tested product. That being the case, there's simply not enough information to come up with an aggregate lab results score for ZoneAlarm.
ZoneAlarm Pro — Draw Results
Given that the premium product includes antivirus features that the free product lacks, I went back to the beginning and ran my hands-on malware protection test again, with no change in the results. ZoneAlarm detected 86 percent of the samples and scored 8.4 of 10 possible points. That's on the low side, but Kaspersky Anti-Virus($29.99 at Kaspersky Lab North America) tends to score lower in my hands-on tests than in lab tests.
Where the free edition allows you to make broad changes to settings for the Trusted Zone and Public Zone, this paid version offers extremely fine-grained control over what network events are permitted in each zone. Unless you're a network wizard, you shouldn't touch these settings. Likewise, only a firewall expert should consider using the advanced option to manually define firewall rules. The same is true of the advanced features added to application control. The point of these features is to catch programs that try to evade detection, but enabling them results in more pop-up queries that you may not be qualified to answer. For the average user, the paid edition's firewall enhancements are just too complex.
In general, lab results should be given more weight in this analysis. However, both our tests and the lab results show that ZoneAlarm does a great job at its core functionality, blocking malicious software from accessing your computer.
We also tested their email support and found that they responded in just under an hour and with accurate information, although our message was sent during work hours on a weekday. Your results may vary depending on the time and day.
Regular readers will know that I have promoted Norton anti-virus as being agood protection against many kinds of malicious software which can come our wayeither by browsing the internet or through e-mail. The version I used wasincorporated in Norton System Works 2002, which I bought about two and a halfyears ago. This particular version has a number of other very useful utilitiesand I was very satisfied with the results. 2ff7e9595c
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