Zone Alarm is still around?! wow, haven’t heard that name is a decade & 1/2...
(I think BlackIce was the same company, wasn’t it?)
Speaking of those... I wonder if they will ever get PeerGuardian back up and running.
I’m still (happily) on Windows 7 (with updates turned off for over two years). I’ve saved some old downloads and one was a firewall program from ZoneAlarm back when it was primarily selling firewall software. Nice simple effective program.
So I have the old program on my Win7 machine and it runs great. One time it asked me to upgrade and, when I did, it wanted to compete with my antivirus and antimalware programs, creating more trouble than it was worth so I uninstalled it and reinstalled the old simple software. That’s why I recognized the name CheckPoint.
Like some other products I’ve enjoyed, this probably got sold to a company that didn’t understand what they had and set about ruining it like yankees that buy up cajun food businesses only to kill them by yankeefying the product (been there, seen that).
One giant misnomer in business is that when a product says they’ve improved it, watch out. Sometimes it’s better but, just as often, it’s not which is why I won’t use Windows 10.