The ZoneAlarm Security Suite is a lot more than just a personal firewall. But at first look, we weren’t too impressed. ZoneAlarm has lost the friendly look most people used to. Instead, a fairly bland color scheme with equally testless icons and indicators make up the interface.The firewall and anti virus form a comparatively smaller portion of the features. There’s a spyware scanner to accompany the anti-virus engine. Other than that, the e-mail scanner can set to scan all incoming and outgoing mails. The junk mail feature is pretty advance, we think: it features a large number of parameters.

Then there’s a parental control feature, parents can now choose from a long list of categories to be blocked. A very useful feature is Game Mode, which ensures you aren’t interrupted in between gaming sessions by alert pop-up. The privacy component takes care of all ads and cookies blocking. IM security is another feature that ensures security isn’t compromised through instant messengers; AOL, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo!. Conversations can be encrypted, but, both the users need to install the suite.

There are slider bar in each of the suite’s components, these help in easily switching strictness between levels. Similarly, most of the features have an advance view, which lets you make precise changes to the rules. In addition, you can use the back-up and restore security settings feature to save and load settings.

The suite ran well in our test, without creating any problems on our Athlon 64 3800+ with 1GB of RAM. Memory consumption was around 45MB most of the time, but the CPU utilization shot all the way up to 90% while scanning for viruses.

Its pretty rare to find a suite such as this with as many features and functionality. At $49.95, ZoneAlarm Security Suite is a wee bit overpriced. Its interesting to note that ZoneAlarm’s image as the friendly, casual-user’s firewall has now been replaced by one of the no-nonsense system protector.

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