Labs

Zone Labs can be credited with virtually creating the whole personal firewall genre and, while early versions left a lot to be desired in terms of system stability, since the third generation things have changed for the better. Not only is ZoneAlarm Pro 4.5 perfectly stable on all the machines we've put it on here, but its maturity shines alongside the competition.

Installation is a matter of accepting the defaults and letting the wizards do their magic: all our tests were passed without any trouble using the default settings. Unlike many of the other applications featured, if you do want to configure your life isn't made a misery. Not only are all the options well presented, but there's lots of useful help and guidance available along the way. Like Norton, ZoneAlarm scans for existing Internet-enabled applications and allocates trust levels to them, plus every new program

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trying to access the outside world will throw up a prompt for you to choose whether to allow once, always or never.

With newly increased authentication of the low-level security coding in the firewall to make it even more resilient to hijacking, application component fingerprinting to protect against Trojans, and an Automatic Network Detection Wizard to hand, you can start to see the power here. New in the 4.5 release are a personal data vault for safe storage of details like credit card numbers and PINs, and an ID lock that alerts you whenever any data from the vault is about to leave across the Internet and giving you the opportunity to block the transfer.

Elsewhere, there's the familiar functionality of the hacker ID track, trace and map service with ISP reporting to grass on those would-be intruders, the MailSafe quarantine for suspect attachments, and the cache cleaner for both hard disk and browser caches. AlertAdvisor remains too, providing understandable detail about threat alerts as they happen. The version we tested also includes an optional web-filtering component providing fully customisable content filtration for family-friendly web browsing.

A vanilla firewall without this comes in at £22 and you might also be tempted by the free version, but this loses many of ZoneAlarm Pro's best features, such as the hacker ID tracking, customisable security settings and limits the MailSafe to just one type of file instead of 47.