ZoneAlarm Extreme Security review

As the name implies, ZoneAlarm Extreme Security is Checkpoint's most extensive suite yet. It incorporates all the features of the ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite with improved browser protection, plus PC tune-up tools and online backup. Though these latter components must be downloaded and installed separately, it adds up to a package that's clearly gunning for Norton 360.

You won't be surprised to learn, though, that the tune-up tools are pretty perfunctory: in the standard package they consist of nothing more than a registry cleaner and defragmenter, which had no measurable impact on our system. If you want the rest of the modules, which include a startup manager and a disk cleanup tool, you have to pay an extra £7. That's so not Extreme.

The online backup module is even less of a bargain. It's merely the free 2GB service as provided by www.idrive.com, rebranded as a ZoneAlarm component. Not that there's anything wrong with IDrive, but if you're paying a premium price for a supposedly fully-featured suite, you should expect more than a bog-standard free service.

The last major "Extreme" feature is the ForceField system, which launches your web browser in a virtualised environment, to prevent malware from affecting your system. It could be a valuable extra line of defence, but the implementation is ugly ??" protected browsers have an eerie green glow, and download requesters are hijacked by ZoneAlarm branding. And it doesn't work at all with Chrome or Safari.

Apart from that, ZoneAlarm Extreme Security is much like the standard Internet Security Suite. The two share a clean (but slightly confusing) front-end, and an admirably broad feature set, including parental controls and an identity protection module that warns you when personal information is being transmitted from your PC. The firewall's not bad either: we found it easy to make our test PC invisible to computers in the software's Internet Zone while those in the Trusted Zone maintained full connectivity.

Unfortunately, Extreme Security also shares its brother's weaker points, including B-grade malware detection. In our test the file scanner spotted 92% of our threats, better than Eset's Smart Security but behind AVG (see above).

And as a suite it's far from economical with system resources. With a standard installation our test system took 39 seconds to boot, with CPU activity then continuing for 12 seconds out of the following two minutes for a total startup time of 51 seconds. Memory usage was high too: after we'd installed the suite our Vista system ate up over a gigabyte of RAM while initialising, and settled down to 810MB ??" easily this month's most cumbersome footprint. Our one relief was that installing the backup module added only around 20MB.

Zone Alarm Extreme Security could have been a respectable all-round package but we see no persuasive reason to shell out the extra £7 rather than sticking with the company's standard suite; and there are several packages out there that do a better all-round job than either.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith