ZoneAlarm Reviews 125

These people are scammers. They claimed I had trojans on my network and tried to sell me extra products for £149.99. Whilst pretending to remove the trojans they damaged my operating system and totally disabled my laptop. It will now have to go in for repair. Avoid these people and don't let them access your computer

I uninstalled Zonealrm on 2 PC's a few months ago. I check my PC's for new files regularly to watch for malware etc and Zonealrm even after unistallation downloads daily security updates on both PC's. Considering Zone-alarm has had a data breach its very concerning that even though I have chosen to delete their product from my PC they are still gathering data from my PC's so if a data breach happened again I might be effected, which is crazy considering I have deleted their service months ago.

I used to rely on ZoneAlarm. It used to be a great program. Now it's like bloatware. All it does is slow down your computer. Videos always...ALWAYS glitch. I'm on the fastest broadband available in the Pacific North West. Uninstalling is a nightmare. Check Point Endpoint Forensic Recorder cannot be removed. What are they stealing from me? I want this off of my computer NOW! And I don't want to have to reinstall windows to do it. I shouldn't have to.

Installs and runs background apps that cause massive stutters and slowdowns, regardless of your CPU power. Their anti-ransomware fills up your disk every time you have the audacity to actually use the Internet. Can't fully remove without a Windows reset/reinstall (or a lot of looking into hidden folders to delete components manually). Broke my Windows and now I have to deal with the cursed netio.sys BSOD far too often.

I had been using ZoneAlarm on-and-off for over a decade, but the software is disastrous at the moment and I won't be returning.

Been using ZoneAlarm 20 years, Very rarely have any trouble, and never been hacked! All the people who say they have trouble work for competing companies, or are not using the setting correctly. You should study how to use full control, so you pick what gets blocked without shutting down your own internet. It can do exactly that if you screw it up. That is what happens to the novice users who don't use it correctly. Watch the instructive videos on YouTube. You can secure your computer with Zone Alarm like with NO other security program!

PC Free, Network Freeze, features don't work -- enough said

DO NOT INSTALL - CANT FULLY REMOVE - WILL SLOW SYSTEM - WILL CONTINUE TO RUN SANDBLAST.

WASTING SO MUCH OF MY TIME TO FIX.

Finally resolved by safe mode restart and removing components manually.

If you watch any online videos, to include YouTube, please DO NOT install ZoneAlarm. My laptop isn't fast (1.86Ghz to be exact), but I was able to watch any online videos without interruption before I installed ZoneAlarm. I did not think it was Zone Alarm that caused the issue, after all, it was only an antivirus software. I deleted Zone Alarm to test it out, and instantly, after a reboot, I was able to watch videos without interruption. The speed felt rejuvenated to youth again. Thank goodness I didn't pay for a year subscription.

Used to be quite good but lately seems to be going downhill. I use it on my laptop which tends to get used as and when. Sometimes weeks go by. When that happens, on start up, Zonealarm informs me that a security update is overdue. Very good. But then it gets dumb at that point. Does it go off and get the update, like most apps do? Nah, it just sits there waiting for YOU to manually initiate the update. And it gets them real slow. Not certain why as this isn't exactly a slow connection.

And do watch out for auto renewal. I suddenly found I'd had one done. Can't recall getting any emails etc to say one was going to happen. As such, log in online and delete it. Or pay by debit card. At least that way I can delete any unwanted debits on my card by myself. The joys of online banking.

I'll be looking at another product I think,

Worst software product out there. It keeps sending packets of my data to an IP address in Israel. After I installed it my computer would get very slow because it was using all of the system resources. Then the icing on the cake was that someone from Israel starting accessing my email account and I got alerts from Google that my pc was infected. All after I installed Zone Alarm from Check Point. Very High Risk software. Very Suspicious activity from Check Point software. Do not trust them, they are like cyber criminals. Look at all the bed reviews on here for Zone Alarm, wish I had read them before downloading their horrible software.

I used their free firewall for years without problems. However this year they decided to change it to nagware, with a popup advert every time I started my computer. No major problem you might think, except every day the nagware caused my computer to completely freeze and need to be restarted wasting valuable time. So I uninstalled and changed to a non-nagware firewall and problem solved, no more freezing computer.

Deleted a few files on a pen drive and noted they'd just been been renamed and moved to a new folder called SandBlastBackup, which I couldn't delete. Then looked at my hard drive and found a directory of the same name containing files deleted over the last 6 weeks, when I upgraded to the latest version of ZoneAlarm, which included the anti-ransomware component. Trouble is, I was contractually required to delete some of those files, and thought I had! Researching the problem found others whose hard disks had been filled by these SandBlastBackup folders.

Fortunately,I ran
\Program Files (x86)\CheckPoint\Endpoint Security\TPCommon\Cipolla\uninst.exe and it removed the anti-ransomware component and all the SandBlastBackup folders, whilst leaving the rest of ZoneAlarm alone.

Whoever coded this component clearly did not have a very good idea of how the world works, and was more concerned with selling the product into organisations already hit by ransomware.

Seriously considering ditching ZA after 10 years when it comes up for renewal.

Zone Alarm is pure fraud. Be careful. They come with your mobile phone contract as a free trial, sneak the charges into your monthly phone bill by sneaking a clause into the contract that you need to call your provider to cancel.

The worst ive ever counterend.
I just reinstalled my system and trough it was a good idea to protect it with zonealarm. a tech blog said it was the nr 1.

It looks poor, options would not adjust, get spammed with all sorts of warnings of legit software with no advice ready and UAC prompts. support account website loops me back to it. can't delete the program trough the uninstaller. can't kill the processes, can't deleted the folder on the C drive. Can't get any update.

Yeah, what else is there to say

I was effectively unable to use my Win7 PC for anything internet related - downloads, streaming, basic browsing, gaming - for over a month. Connection to the internet would be slow and drop every 10 seconds or so, meaning webpages wouldn't load properly, and anything requiring a sustained connection was no longer possible.

It came after a standard Redistributable C++ windows update. There was no indication that this was an issue stemming from ZoneAlarm. I tried disabling the ZoneAlarm services early on as a possible solution, along with my Avast firewall, but this didnt work. System Restore wasn't working. A month down the line, out of pocket from numerous tech support options and seemingly having exhausted every possible cause, I decided that it must simply be a case of "Old PC, needs an overhaul" and was literally in the process of buying Windows 10 Pro, when I decided to try and clear my new-ish SSD for the install. I noticed that some difficult to delete security files had copied themselves to my SSD in the short time I'd had it installed, and realised that these were related to ZoneAlarm's anti-ransomware service. A forum online had previously told me to leave these alone as they are important and harmless (big mistake), but I knew they were on my HDD anyway so found out how to delete them properly. After unistalling the anti-ransomware program (a convoluted task in itself) I tested my net and for the first time in over a month, it was working smoothly. It appeared that ZoneAlarm did not like the C++ update and had decide to choke my PC in response.

In all this time, there had been no ZoneAlarm update whatsoever. It beggars belief that there would be no response from them since I imagine I can't be/have been the only one that this issue has affected.

If it had not been a free program then I would certainly be asking for compensation right about now. Much of my personal and professional life relies on a stable internet connection and it pains me to think of the time, money and effort I've spent trying to circumvent this stupid issue.
I've replaced the software with a more trusted provider.

Its security is way too paranoid that it make internet surfing a hell of an experience. It slows down my connection and it kept freezing my browser tabs. It also blocks skype! Embedded videos on forums, You cannot play them neither.

Badly Programed!

Good program if it did not fill up your hard drive with Sandblast files.

This just has NOT been thought through at all, it is a badly thought through piece of software!

Dont install it unless you have at least a 1TB hard drive!!!

Product seems ok at firewall and anti-virus functions. It has an ongoing massive problem doing its own updates. They freeze at 0% or get to 100% and then 'error'. The usual chat support solution is to uninstall it and reinstall, or that the version you are running it out of date and a fresh install is needed - can't even self-update when that happens and there is no proper notification of it. I have used this product for many years and have been in contact with support dozens and dozens of times to resolve the constant update problems. I end up wasting inordinate amounts of time fixing the program (uninstall, clean, reinstall and then re-register) because of it. Going to another brand now as fed up.

This "anti-virus" software simply passes all well known software such as Microsoft and labels the software of small companies as having a virus which they decline to describe. If you pay for this software, you are wasting your money!

After uninstalling ZoneAlarm, my internet was gone. So I have reached their support through another device and just said that:

"Unfortunately, you got disconnected from chat earlier and I didn't know what happened. For free versions, you can join our online community and post your issue from there. Unfortunately, we do not have technical support for the free versions."

The uninstaller should have been configured to disable and remove all of ZoneAlarm's components but the program sucks.