Firewall Performance
I recently uninstalled Outpost Pro’s Firewall from my laptop because of performance issues. Outpost had just announced a full suite of firewall and antivirus and I had been thinking seriously about giving up my old antivirus program and moving to the suite when the performance issues started. I really liked the superb control allowed by the firewall’s custom rules but I just couldn’t accept that starting of some programs would suffer inexplicable delays. Even notepad was being hit, sometimes taking more than twenty seconds to start.
I replaced Outpost Pro with ZoneAlarm but now I seem to be running into the same problem with it. I thought that I had finally discovered the problem when I turned off the anti-spyware features of the firewall and the problem seemed to go away but after a restart all the problems were still there.
I never had any problems with the 3.x version of Outpost or with the 6.x version of ZoneAlarm. I am also having trouble working out exactly what sort of changes were required to “improve” the firewall’s performance since those versions. Both of the firewalls boasted of total control over interaction between the programs on your computer and the Internet so what, exactly, have the changes been about.
Last year I tried the standalone anti-spyware Spy Sweeper and after a trial period I purchased the program. Then a major upgrade came along and caused exactly the same sort of problems as I have been experiencing with the firewall software so I removed it and complained to the company who promptly refunded the purchase price of the software after I explained that their program had never found a single example of spyware on my machine that hadn’t been removed by a combination of AdAware free version, Spybot Search and Destroy and my antivirus, NOD32.
If the antispyware capability being built in to the firewalls is causing the performance issues then I do not want them. I would happily pay a yearly subscription for a firewall that works like the older versions of Outpost and ZoneAlarm. Does anybody make one?
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