Thanks for your help, Donk. I was hoping my Windows firewall would be enough security but I wanted to be sure. Seemed to me like if Microsoft put it on here it must be enough. I'm sure I only had ZA firewall working when it was installed though because as far as I could tell ZA blocked it out on it's own. When I went to security center to look it always told me ZA was my firewall and a couple of times when I shut ZA down trying to fix it I got an alert saying that my computer wasn't protected.
I already knew about msconfig and unchecking unnecessary boxes for startup and had already done that but nothing changed until like I said I removed ZA and that's when things got better. I saw somewhere that ZA was causing a problem like that with XP but I would have sworn the last time I downloaded a newer version that was one of the things that they said had been fixed. I never noticed any difference after installing that download though. Thanks again for your help. I feel better now. I downloaded a virus program last night and am getting ready to install it in a few minutes so that should take care of things, hopefully. Patty On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 11:00 AM, Donk <[email protected]> wrote: > > > 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]<bixen%40optonline.net>Please do not post personal issues > directly to the group. > > > > To unsubscribe from this list, send an email to > [email protected]<A-1-Computer_Tech-unsubscribe%40yahoogroups.com> > > > > Thank you for using A-1 Computer TechYahoo! 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