Wednesday, July 09, 2008

ZoneAlarm / Internet problems today

I woke up today and had no internet. I checked and rechecked my modem and my router. I rebooted them. I rebooted my computers. Nothing! Then I turned off ZoneAlarm and everything worked. Hmmm. That's no good. After much hassle, I looked for help online.

Turns out the problem is cause by one of the Windows patches released yesterday. If you have Windows, and ZoneAlarm, you have probably been affected by the problem if the patch was installed. (Many computers are set to install the patches automatically, so you may not have even known your computer installed them).

Here's a link with some suggested workarounds:
(http://download.zonealarm.com/bin/free/pressReleases/2008/LossOfInternetAccessIssue.html)

9 comments:

  1. So did you have to get new virus protection software? I heard zone alarm worked well and I think I used it myself a few years back, but it made my pc run slow.

    It's hard to find good virus protection. Most just want to charge you ridiculous prices and all they do is make my computer lag! I was running Norton Antivirus but my subscription ran out a few months ago. I should really get some new software on here soon.

    Whenever I get a new computer, I think I'm gong to go for a mac instead. I'll just have to get used to Linux.

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  2. Oh...One more thing. I wasn't sure if you knew or not, but I wanted to know if deleting Internet Explorer off my computer would hinder any other programs on my pc? I despise IE and am strictly Firefox as it runs much more smoothly without all the flashy crap.

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  3. my virus protection is not working to well today either

    i woke up with a sore throat.

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  4. Matthew,

    I guess I should have mentioned that I simply use the free ZoneAlarm firewall, not antivirus. It was the monthly Windows update that didn't work well with ZoneAlarm, that caused many people's internet connections to not work.

    Once I applied the workaround mentioned in this post, everything was fine.

    As for antivirus, I use AVG. It's totally free and it works great. It doesn't tend to take up too much RAM, and I've been using it for years and it's worked great.

    I'm a total Firefox user as well. I don't recommend getting rid of Internet Explorer. It's integrated too closely with the Windows operating system, and I've heard many horror stories from people who have tried to uninstall it. I simply leave it alone, and that's worked fine for me.

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  5. Ah, I gotcha. I may try installing that sometime. Thanks for the heads up on the IE stuff. I had a feeling it would screw something up, which is why I haven't uninstalled it yet. ;)

    I always feel like when I or someone else types RAM they're screaming it in mid sentence.

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  6. I've thought the same thing about RAM too. Maybe I'll just try to whisper 'ram' from now on. I guess I could just say MEMORY... I mean, memory. I don't want to shout at anybody. It might ruin my reputation. ;)

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  7. Good to know this. I too have Zone Alarm.
    Thanks Joel!

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