Zone Alarm and win XP help?

General Questions
#1

Hiya all…

I have 2 questions that I’m hoping that someone will be able to answer.

1: I’ve just downloaded Zone Alarm and have installed it. The computer I use is the “server” for my home network and I thought it’s about time I put in a firewall… I could use some help with setting zonealarm up, or even point me in the direction of a website or three. could someone, in relatively plain english, explain to me how to go about the setting up process?

I’m not a total computer illiterate person - I know enough to get myself into trouble and occasionally out of it :slight_smile: .

2: I’m using Windose XP and I have a P4 1.6 with 256Mb, and an internal modem. My problem and question are - over the last few days the modem has been disconnecting after only a few minutes. Could it be a conflict with some hardware or something? I usually have my email client (outlook express) set to check email every 3 minutes, but I’ve had to change that to every 1 min but it still didn’t work… The other option I can think of is that someone has got my password and is using my dialup account for some nefarious purpose :eek:
oh well.
Thanks in advance for your help…
LeeJam

#2

Howdy.

  1. Setting up ZA in XP is surprisingly easy, especially if you use a later realease of ZA. In my case, all I did was have everything up and running on the network (Make sure you can see and access what you want to on your network) and fire up the set-up program. At some point early in the process, ZA should give you a dialogue box that says something along the lines of ‘Automatically add current network connections to the allowed list?’, or something like that. Click yes and it appears that ZA goes ahead and gives permissions out to your local network addresses. I say appears because after that everything still worked fine across my local network and ZA never asked me again if I wanted to allow this or that to access things. So, it appears that it allows permission to all those apps that are currently running at the time of the install, or at least that’s my impression of it.

  2. Most likely, it’s a server side issue that should resolve itself on its own, unless, of course, you’ve added some new software at the same time that the problems started. I’d start with a call to your ISP. It wouldn’t be until later, after other things had been resolved, that I’d start thinking hackers or the like. And even then it’s pretty remote that have access to your system.

#3

Thanks CnoteChris, So you reckon I should just let it do it’s thing?

#4

Shoot. I didn’t see that you’d already installed ZA. Oh well, it’s still pretty simple. Start cruising around the net and doing what you normally do and ZA will start hounding you on whether or not you want to hand out permissions to certain apps. For the most part, it’s pretty easy to tell which app is trying to get your permission. If, for instance, you open up MS’s Media Player, ZA might ask you, ‘Do you want to allow MS Media to access the internet?’. If you want to, say yes. If not, no. The next question will be whether you want to allow that app access to the net whenever it wants. If you do, then click the ‘Remember this application’ tab towards the bottom of the ZA pop-up window.

If you’re worried that the denied access to something and that it’s now dropping you off the 'net, simply open up ZA and start unchecking apps that have been given ‘denied access’, or whatever it’s called, until the problem resolves.

But again, it’s been my experience that if you’ve been able to access the internet with that modem for even short periods of time, it’s not a ZA problem, it’s a ISP problem. If it were ZA’s problem, you wouldn’t be able to access the net at all.

#5

Yes.

Why I didn’t say that from get-go is beyond me.

*- Carpal Tunnel Syndrom- the penance of long-windedness.

#6

As a side note for something to file away, if you ever get to the point that you uninstall ZoneAlarm, be sure to do so very carefully. Read up on it first (at the ZoneAlarm site and do some Google searches). It can cause some very tricky problems due to how it has embedded itself into your computer. Nothing you can’t take care of with a little effort, but it can be darn troublesome (personal experience speaking here.)

#7

When i updated zone Alarm, it caused the screen to go all grey. Then when i rebooted, windows installer came up and tried to install Office XP. Odd, since i have Office 2000 installed. So now i have to order Office XP through work (i’d have to anyway, due to site liscence reasons, but this just prioritised it) and install it to see if that fixes the problem. otherwise i’m stumped.