Hi - You can have the best AV protection in the world - but it's no good it if messes up your computer performance so bad you can't stand it. One rule is that you never want to have more than 1 firewall running at the same time. Maybe you had ZA and XP's firewall and they were conflicting and slowing you down? What likely happened when you had the power failure was that the computer crashing repeatedly corrupted some of ZA's files. I'm kinda surprised it didn't mess up some of your windows files too.
In my opinion I think XP's firewall is generally safe enough - but many people will disagree with me since it basically only catches "incoming" threats, and basically ignores any weired stuff your PC might be sending out. I've been using just XP's firewall for years on a couple machines and have never gotten infected. Plus, if you are behind a router (which you probably are since most ISP's now issue combo router/modems) the router will block most incoming threats. In fact many routers have their own firewall built into them. I would suggest you try just running a good AV program (like AVG anti-virus, which is free), and using XP's built-in firewall. But, you should probably post this to some other tech forums since you won't get many (or any) other opinions here. This list isn't very active. Also you'll want to occasionally run a good malware program like Malwarebytes. Oh, and when your PC is running slowly, the first thing to look at is your background programs. Go to Start, Run, and type MSCONFIG. Click the Startup tab. Every app that has a checkmark starts running at bootup and keeps running in the background. For good system performance you want to keep these apps to a bare minimum. Some of these might be your AV program, or other things you need, but chances are many of them are unnecessary to have running all the time slowing you down. You can go to this website to look up what each app does, and if you need to have it running constantly in the background: http://www.sysinfo.org/startuplist.php Go to the site and type the name of each startup app in the search box. Uncheck any app that isn't absolutely necessary. Good luck, Donk Patty wrote: > I was wondering if the Windows Firewall on my computer is good enough > protection? I am using Windows XP. I had Zone Alarm Extreme Security on it > but took it off today because of problems I was having with it. For a > while now my computer has been pretty slow but I didn't realize until today > after I uninstalled ZA that it may have been ZA that was causing it. > > The problem I was having began about three weeks ago when my computer was on > and we had a power failure. It went off and on several times before finally > staying off a few hours. Ever since then my ZA wouldn't update. It looked > and acted like it was but no matter how long I left it alone to see if it > would it didn't. I even downloaded the newest version hoping that would fix > the problem but it didn't. It's just been telling me I needed to update > which is what I've been trying to do for two weeks now with no success. > > So, I finally gave up and decided to uninstall it and then do a clean > install hoping that would fix it. But, like I said now that it's out of my > computer I see what was causing it to be so slow so I'm really not very > enthused about reinstalling it now. Before I removed it today most of my > programs took a year and a day to open. When I tried to print something it > took so long for it to begin printing that it was very frustrating. I had > people tell me it sounded like my computer was about to die. But, now that > ZA is gone everything opens pretty quickly and any printing I have done > starts pretty quickly too. Things sometimes froze up but not any more now > that ZA is out. So, I'm thinking it was surely ZA causing all the > problems. > > I know I need to get Virus software now that I took ZA out but I'm just > using Windows Firewall and hoping that is enough protection for my computer > unless someone here tells me differently > > Thanks, > Patty > > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] > > > > ------------------------------------ > > If you have any questions or problems with any aspect of this site, please > feel free to contact me directly [email protected] Please do not post > personal issues directly to the group. > > To unsubscribe from this list, send an email to > [email protected] > > Thank you for using A-1 Computer TechYahoo! 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