Personal Firewalls Keep Intruders at Bay

ZoneAlarm 2.1

Surprisingly, the most secure of the three firewalls we tested was also the cheapest. A 1.6MB download from FileWorld, Zone Labs' ZoneAlarm firewall and updates are free for individual users and cost $19.95 annually for business users.

This firewall was the easiest of the three to install on our test PC, requiring the fewest steps to get up and running. Two sliders let you independently select a range of security settings for local and Internet connections. With ZoneAlarm's sliders set to the default of high security for Internet applications and medium security for local network applications, we went back to Shields Up, where we earned a "very secure" rating. The site could read no information about the PC; some of the PC's ports were visible but closed. When we returned to the site and tested ZoneAlarm's highest security setting, our PC was in full stealth mode--no ports were detected.

You might expect a free, powerful firewall to be difficult to use. ZoneAlarm is quite the opposite: You can easily adjust the security level with sliders for both local network and Internet access. If you click the Advanced button, you can access network settings. Though you won't get a manual or CD-ROM instructions with ZoneAlarm, we found it easy to set up without help. A nice touch in this latest version of ZoneAlarm is that it contains a MailSafe feature that claims to protect your system from viruses written in Visual Basic Script, such as "ILove You." (We didn't test this feature.)

Bottom line: ZoneAlarm is the most secure of the three firewalls we tested--and you can't beat the price.

All three programs made our test machine safer. Both McAfee Firewall and Norton Personal Firewall 2000 provided solid protection and myriad advanced features--but we preferred the excellent (and free) Zone Alarm.