Ok, so I've been searching these forums cause kojn, morf and fisume or some of them says there should be a thread about this. I get lag spikes when I play and they say it's a ZoneAlarm problem. Now if you could point me to the correct thread or recommend some other nice firewall I would be happy.
This just suddenly started to happen like a week or so ago. Been running ZoneAlarm for many months, why does it start to act up like this all of a sudden? I'm too paranoid to just shut it off while I play cause I want some protection obviously. (Morfar loves to turn his firewalls off, but that's just not me)

How are you accessing the Interweb? If you have a router, does it have a built in firewall? If not, routers with firewalls aren't too expensive. That would be your best bet.

have you installed one of the latest windows patches due to the dns-security flaw ? have a look here:
http://download.zonealarm.com/bin/free/pressReleases/2008/LossOfInternetAccessIssue.html

Dearest ai, those software firewalls don't give you real security anyway. Generally they cause you much more problems than prevent you from having some.

Urmel wrote:Dearest ai, those software firewalls don't give you real security anyway. Generally they cause you much more problems than prevent you from having some.

Don't say that you bafoon, these firewalls is my main protection
No, I never install or download any windows updates as THEY cause more trouble than help you. I only have bad experiences with those and honestly I can't imagine why people actually install and trust them. I hate them more than anything else (yes even more than goths and emos).

Heh, I'm not too sure if my router has a firewall or not, I've lost the password for it and I don't want to reset it as it's a family router and I'm afraid I might mess it up (even though it's unlikely). However, everything has worked perfectly till everything went to the crapper. Something must have happened with me. I am not infected by any viruses that I know, I'm gonna scan for spybots and whatnot now. I'm thinking of getting the whole AVG pack, firewall, anti-virus and the whole kit.

ai wrote:I'm thinking of getting the whole AVG pack, firewall, anti-virus and the whole kit.

That sounds like a complete waste of money. If you've lost the access details for the router, you can probably do a hardware reset on it to reset them to defaults. Find some instructions on the Internet for how to do this. Then poke around and see if it has a firewall. If so, uninstall the firewall from your PC. If not, buy a new router, it may well be cheaper than software.

there is ZoneAlarm for Linux?

ai wrote:No, I never install or download any windows updates as THEY cause more trouble than help you. I only have bad experiences with those and honestly I can't imagine why people actually install and trust them. I hate them more than anything else (yes even more than goths and emos).

Well, sorry, but that is asking for trouble. If you tolerate security holes in your system libraries your firewall software (sitting atop those libraries) won't save you.

Instead of closing the gaps in the hull of your ship you're installing faster water pumps. While this is *some* sort of security concept it won't keep you afloat forever. Now, you're mentioning that all of sudden your networking behaves different. One possibility is that you're already sinking.

Notice that most attacks nowadays won't work by means of "unasked connections" to your system (something a firewall can block) but by e.g. "drive-by downloads" - something firewalls *won't* block as your computer did initiate those connections. And why do drive-by downloads work? Because e.g. some faulty image decoders, HTML renderers or script interpreters (this list is incomplete) go titsup when seeing slightly malformed input and will execute injected code. Nope, zero protection from a firewall. Your only hope is that updates will fix those faulty system components or that your malware scanner will detect and stop the nastyness in time (and often this doesn't work very good either).

If you don't trust Microsoft (nothing wrong with that) you shouldn't run Windows. Period. Turning down the only viable offer of getting rid of known security holes in Windows is not an option. One needs to get rid of the entry points for malware. Firewalls are one *additional* line of defense, as are virus scanners.

I haven't used those windows updates for years and my computer has always run smooth because I know how to protect myself when it really matters. I do install the service packs just not those damn 100-500 mb each update that are released constantly, like everyday. Honestly if I would install every single update I wouldn't have any space left on my harddrives (this is true, really).
But yeah, I know how to protect myself without using the windows crap (comes with the years).
The only reason I ask as to which new firewall to get is that people say ZoneAlarm can give you trouble with Nexuiz and that other people have had the same problem. I'm not asking a speach of what I should do or not (security wise), just how people have solved this current problem that I seem to have.

ai wrote:I hate them more than anything else (yes even more than goths and emos).

I'm a goth..and 4m also...

Ahahahaha! Wait.... that's me!

lol this reminds me of another discussion:

ai when i used to play ut2004 i got 'lag spikes' problems when i had zonealarm running, even though i actually had it on 'gaming-mode' or whatever its called.

I found out the problem was, yes you guessed it zone-alarm, it kept auto-updating all the f**cking time.

This could be a problem, but not to sure, but there should be some option to disable that and check you have it to allow gaming-mode

i remember tossing ZA for becoming a resource hog and other silly things.

4m wrote:a resource hog

eheh
Oink oink!

For me this works well. Never a problem. Kaspersky Internet Security

http://www.kaspersky.com/

I have the free version of ZoneAlarm so I don't even know if there is a gaming-mode thing, at least I haven't been able to find it. However there is an 'automatic updates' button. I switched to manual updating while playing hoping that this was the problem but of course it couldn't be that simple.

And as far as I know my ZoneAlarm runs just fine without hogging the resources, I had another firewall doing that a lot worse than my ZA (which was the reason I switched to another).

I had Kaspersky before but there was something I didn't like with it so I switched from that too. Maybe that was my resource hogger, don't quite remember. I've tried tons of different firewalls and tried to graps a firm grip of which were more popular and better than the others. Many recommended AVG and ZoneAlarm. But now that AVG has a complete pack it's something I've been looking into.

I had ZA (pro) for 2 years on WinXP but eventually dumped it for COMODO Pro (free as in beer). It offers more control than ZA (ingoing and outgoing) and never seemed to slow things down like ZA did. If you don't figure out the ZA problem, go with COMODO.

http://www.personalfirewall.comodo.com/

Xeno The Blind wrote:I had ZA (pro) for 2 years on WinXP but eventually dumped it for COMODO Pro (free as in beer). It offers more control than ZA (ingoing and outgoing) and never seemed to slow things down like ZA did. If you don't figure out the ZA problem, go with COMODO.

http://www.personalfirewall.comodo.com/

Thanks, I'll think I try it.

Btw, anyone who has tried or has more info/experience on these?

http://www.bitdefender.com/media/html/gamesafe.html
http://www.steelseries.com/steelsecurity