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I finally got tired of Zone Alarm hogging all of my resources so I am giving Tiny Personal Firewall a try.
Ok, so I am apparently a little spoiled by the ease of ZA but Tiny is like in my face every other minute asking me if I want to allow or deny these addresses and packets tha tI have absolutlely no idea who or what they are.
Does anybody use Tiny and know the proper way to avoid seeing every little hit I get?
My resources have never been better then they are right now at 87% at start up.
Bryan
I'm sure you know it, but I'll mention it anyway. Free 'System resources' do not affect the performance of the system until they drop to zero. Than the system mau become unstable.
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If your unhappy with Tiny, try Sygate its also free for home use and is very easy, I like it because I have Call Wave (answering Machine 1 phone line) and I can set it to steath and set to rec call wave and its great, when I had zone alarm had to set security to med so never passed tests at all the test sites, but with Sygate you can put everyone to high and not worry, and little resources compared to Zone Alarm
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Red, thank you , yes I am well aware of that although I could argue the point as this machine starts to get boggy when below 40%.
What I was actually referring to is the True Vector continually reading and writing to the hard drive. Using Filemon I could not even capture the log because it would not hold still long enough to do so. I even had trouble closing Filemon for the same reason.
It was the latest version of Zone Alarm. I did not have this problem with the older versions of ZA and True Vector.
Sue, I have already downloaded Sygate but was trying Tiny first as it is smaller in size. Thank you for your feedback on Sygate.
To go back to my original post...I am getting to see the similarity to ZA in alllowing the premissions I need to allow but I think my question can be modified to;
Can Tiny be set to stop showing every alert like ZA provides that option?Bryan
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Bryco, I tried Tiny Firealarm, but uninstalled it because I am not that knowlegable on settings of all that security stuff, seemed like a good program.
* And I also started haveing problem with the new Zone Alarm 3, and didn't have before that.
**Wanted to let you know there is a real small program called Registry Detective (free) from PC Magazine, that is a great program, when I uninstalled Zone Alarm did a search of the registry and searchd files, Registry Detective still found more entries something like zmail safe, can't really remember, but you should get the program, it finds all entries associated with programs like zone alarm, and after finding these entries you have your choice to call up that entry and delete it or not, Registry Detective itself does not delete or change anything just finds it for you, really a neet small program.
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Regarding the low 'System Resources':
The fact that System Resources are getting low indicates that you probably have a bunch of applications running. The 'real' reason for the system bogging down is probably due to one or more of the applications eating up memory or CPU cycles. Trust me, it's not related to the low system resources.
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By the way (for those who are curious), the choice of 'System Resources' by MS was really dumb and misleading. It's just a couple of small blocks of memory set aside for windows data.
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Sue I will get Registry Detective when I get home. I already have Registry Editor Plus from PC Mag. Thanks for the recommendation.
Red, I very rarely get to or below 40% System resources and when I do I understand completed why.
It is the CPU cycles that ZA's True Vector was continually chewing on that inspired me to try another. true Vector was also running something from within IE also but I will not go into that now as it is moot. I have successfully removed ZA and True Vector from my machine.
I am hoping that nobody is taking any of this wrong. I am not here to discredit ZA or Zonelabs fine program. I am a true supporter of it. I have used many versions of it and now want to try another as an alternative.
Either way, any PC with a Cable or DSL connection should have a firewall.
My next project just might be to replace McAfee as it chews CPU cycles every 60 seconds that causes my Winamp songs to skip a beat once every minute like clockwork.
Just in case anyone is still reading this post; I found my Internet connection speed improved as a result of replacing ZA with Tiny firewall. I am on cable so the difference is negligable but improved by about 20% (over 600kbps avg vs 500kbps avg)
Thanks for the feedback.
Bryan
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Jack, I thought I would give that a try but it was already disabled in msconfig.
Thanks
Bryan
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I've been running TPF for a long time and have had no problems with it. I canned the professional version of Sygate because it constantly locked up the machine. The thing to do with the pop up warnings is to disallow any that do not come from known good sources. Your ISP may ping you on occasion and that should be let through. Whenever you tell it to deny, then check the box telling it to develop a rule. It will automatically disallow those locations without bothering you in the future. It always asks for your approval for a program to access the web, but here again, check the box and it will leave you alone in the future. After it settles in, you will only see the occasional web spider or hacker pop up.
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Chris, Thank you for your confirmation of my new understanding of how it works.
Thanks again.
Bryan
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Bryco,
Here is an excerpt from a user at another
forum, thought you might find it of interest:==========================
I use Tiny firewall, and Kerio recently
took over Tiny. I wanted to use Kerio's new
version (a better Firewall). It crashed
on me all the time, so I uninstalled it.
Tiny's is half the size of Sygate or ZA,
and I have no problem, it does it's job. It
uses very few resources.
==========================
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Sekirt, Thanks.
I just got back from grc.com and Tiny has performed as well as ZA has.
I apparently have my 'rules' set up right because I did not get a single alert while visiting grc.com and using their tools.If I get to liking Tiny any more than I do now then I will be recommending it over ZA in the future. Too soon to form an unbiased opinion but I suspect it will be the case.
Thanks for the feedback.
Bryan
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I installed Tiny on 4Oct and you can see the consistantly improved average throughput using Numion Speed Tester
Date/time Throughput
1. 05/10/02 19:48:57 83713 Bps 670 kbps
2. 05/10/02 06:17:17 83091 Bps 665 kbps
3. 04/10/02 06:06:10 82389 Bps 659 kbps
4. 04/10/02 06:05:23 79059 Bps 632 kbps
5. 29/09/02 07:15:07 62621 Bps 501 kbps
6. 29/09/02 07:14:01 65943 Bps 528 kbps
7. 01/09/02 06:02:57 69658 Bps 557 kbps
8. 01/09/02 06:01:45 54357 Bps 435 kbps
9. 01/09/02 06:00:29 64766 Bps 518 kbps
10. 01/09/02 05:59:46 70207 Bps 562 kbps
Average: 71580 Bps 573 kbpsI had peak packets at 1023kbps on the latest test. I have seen them much higher.
Bryan
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