A few months ago I discussed moving from the Symantec Norton Anti-Virus that I had been using for years for both my own PCs and my client's. At the time, I recommended the free package for Road Runner (RR) customers, called eTrust EZ Armor. But the ensuing months of frustration have made me return to old faithful. Here's why:
The EZ package is a product of Computer Associates (CA) - a very well respected company in the business software arena. But the package is composed of at least three pieces - the anti-virus is CA's own product, the firewall is the Zone Alarms (ZA) firewall, and the anti-spam component was from a company called Qurb. My first problem was with Qurb: if you have more than one Inbox and use Microsoft Outlook rules to automatically filter your incoming email into separate categories, Qurb does not work. I verified it with both RR and Qurb tech support that Qurb only works with emails that go into the Inbox only. No fix in sight, and useless for me as it is.
The second problem was that the ZA firewall caused my Outlook email processing to slow down drastically - to the point where the connections with the email servers actually timed out. I was able to verify this on the ZA user forum. ZA themselves never answered, but one of their forum users, labeled as a "guru", said that he had the same problem but was unable to fix it. Calls to RR were no help - they said that the problem was not previously reported and that they thus didn't know how to fix it.
The next problem was also with the ZA firewall. You train a firewall over time to allow or deny access of programs and websites. But the whole idea is that it remembers these settings, so you don't get bothered again in the future. The ZA firewall seems to periodically forget its settings and asks you all over again - very annoying. I have seen this behavior on two of my PCs, and many of my clients'. Again a call to RR support yielded no knowledge of the problem.
My next move was to download the ZA Internet Security Suite. This should have been, in theory, the same package as EZ. It's nice that they have a free trial download. But when I did that, I found that the software was one complete version newer than the RR free software (6.1 vs. 5.1). I was hoping that there would be fixes to some of my problems in that newer version, and was willing to pay for it if so.
Alas, not completely. The Qurb problem was still there and the slow email problem was still there. The firewall settings problem, however, was fixed.
Now, I really did like the ZA firewall. It is elegant in the settings and control you have over your Internet connection and programs, and it is much easier to find information and to configure it than Norton. But the vast array of settings would be daunting to most people. It also has a bad habit of rejecting things (cookies, etc.) but not telling you which website it is rejecting them for. You should be aware that websites often invoke other websites internally, and if you don't know the names of these internal websites you can't configure ZA. Usually you can get that information from their log files, but they contained nothing to help.
So, with a tear in my eye (well, perhaps not), I installed Norton 2006 - my comfort zone. Happy? Not really, but it's the best I could do at the time. By the way, I also did consider the McAfee package, but I tend to like Norton better. If McAfee had a free trial download I might have experimented with it a bit, but they don't offer that.
For now, I plan to go back to installing Norton at my clients, and will migrate those using EZ to something else. If cost is an issue, I might recommend using the free AVG anti-virus (which has been getting some good press recently) with the free ZA firewall. The free ZA firewall does not have all the features of their full firewall, but that may be a good thing from a usability standpoint. But, remember, the free versions do not have all the features and protection.
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)