Preston wrote:
>Would I be better off replacing ZA's firewall and/or one or both Anti*
>features with freeware programs?.....I suspect that this question is like 
>asking "how many angels exist on a
>head of a pin?">>


No. Telling you the number of angels is much easier.

Depends entirely what you want and how paranoiac you need to be. For most 
people doing normal browsing for home use, what you have is quite adequate. 
Depends also how many people are using your computer. If your computer is 
open to all and sundry, you probably need as much security as you can get. 
If it works for you, stick with it.

Those Who Know (ie IT tech journalists and the like) mostly agree that 
all-in-one solutions are never going to be quite as effective as fully 
dedicated separate a-v's, firewalls, trojan hunters, rootkits, etc.

But then, the chances of you or I ever running into some of the more 
esoteric badware are pretty remote, provided we behave ourselves within 
normal reason.

Whatever you have, nothing will be perfect. So it all gets down in the end 
to how close to perfect you want to be.

I would consider adding WinPatrol (www.winpatrol.com) to your defences--it 
has some excellent protection functions which combine well with regular 
data-based software. It does not rely on a database, but looks for 
suspicious actions  (eg changing your browser home page, or adding browser 
toolbars, or changing file associations or certain registry modifications) 
and asks for your permission before allowing any such actions. I run it 
with Zone Alarm Pro and Alvira free a-v. It makes it pretty difficult for 
anything to sneak into your system unseen.

I'm not pretending my system's perfect---it's not. But it's been pretty 
well 100% successful over the last few years. Different readers will have 
different ideas on this topic.

Don Penlington
 From the Beach at Surfers Paradise in sunny Queensland.
Computer tutorials, local scenery,  and other things at my website:
http://users.tpg.com.au/deepend/index1.html

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