ZoneAlarm Does A Norton

by Marc Z in Software
May 15

A few days ago my PC began behaving very sluggishly. Firefox start up time went to 2 solid minutes and the rest of the programs very loading 3 times slower as well. I thought it might have something to do with SP3 for Windows XP that I had chosen to download from the Windows Update service so I waited for a few days.

Today I couldn’t take it anymore and checked the Task Manager and found ScanningProcess.exe running there. I had never seen it before so I looked it up and found the answer in some forum. (Everything can be looked up on the internet within seconds so remember this the next time you want to ask someone a question.)

The process in question belonged to ZoneAlarm, the firewall program I use. I’ve used ZA for a while and never experienced these slowdowns unless it was actively scanning so I checked the options and there was the problem. The antivirus part of the program which I usually leave disabled (since I run other antivirus software) was enabled. Turning it off restored my system to its marginally speedy self. Hurray.

Comments

9 Responses

  1. Arun M says:

    Ah! I recall that ScanningProcess.exe on my system. I removed ZoneAlarm and moved on to Fedora after that :p

    Posted on May 15th, 2008 at 8:03 pm

  2. Arun M says:

    Oh.. and what does the title exactly mean? Norton slows down your system, and you say ZA is as bad as Norton?

    Posted on May 15th, 2008 at 8:05 pm

  3. Marc Z says:

    ZA behaved like Norton until I turned of the inbuilt antivirus.

    Norton as we all know is an operating system in itself and is not meant to be installed on Windows.

    Posted on May 15th, 2008 at 9:25 pm

  4. Arun says:

    I had it turned on. It has not slowed mine so much. Now I have it turned off, let’s see.

    Posted on May 15th, 2008 at 9:35 pm

  5. harish says:

    me too had ZA some time back, and my system was just slow as something….

    Posted on May 16th, 2008 at 7:32 pm

  6. Vinod says:

    My system is about to crash :D You see I am very happy. I think this will make my brother and father think of getting a new system and this time I will for sure get into that and ask my dad to get a better pc so that I can play new games. This system is allowing me to play games that were released in 2002 and games after that hardly work in my system except few games :(

    Posted on May 17th, 2008 at 9:42 am

  7. Adithya says:

    I only use the free firewall and anti spyware. Why did you download the whole pack?

    Posted on May 17th, 2008 at 10:33 am

  8. Marc Z says:

    The whole pack? I have only the firewall, spyware module and the antivirus module.

    Note that ZA does not slow down my system with the antivirus scanning module off.

    Posted on May 17th, 2008 at 8:08 pm

  9. Adithya says:

    Yes but why do you need the anti virus module if you are not using it?

    Posted on May 17th, 2008 at 8:47 pm

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