Comments on: ZoneAlarm Nightmare

By: Caty

Caty — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 03:26:40 +0000

I do understand your pain. I have since then switched to Norton 360, guess there will be no more ZA for me.

By: John Butkans

John Butkans — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 11:00:10 +0000

The newest free ZA release is an unmitigated nightmare and disaster that has caused me untold horror and frustration over days. It blocked my internet access. But I didn’t know this at 1st. If only I had read this blog 1st!
I did from soup to nuts, and nuts to soup, to regain access. Repair reinstalls of XP Pro, and the extremely time consuming and frustrating problems I encountered each time updating Windows. I fought hurdle after frustrating hurdle here.
But that’s another story/issue to do with Microsoft’s incredibly buggy, bloated, overpriced OS’s. Someday the full truth will come out as to what Bill Gates really sold to the world. I digress… and yet Windows updating extreme difficulties were an integral complicating part of my ZA caused difficulties, as it turned out.
RevoUninstaller would freeze repeatedly as ZA refused to uninstall the many times I was wrong enough to try it again, in the process of troubleshooting. Again, I wrongly tho’t the problem had to lay elsewhere. That was my underlying error thro’ this whole long, sorry process of getting my ‘puter back to normal.
Again, if I’d only read this blog, or similar 1st!
Anyway, ZA that I’ve used for yrs, and promoted, stays off my ‘puter till further notice.

By: Caty

Caty — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 01:32:30 +0000

I think the easiest way to do away with any system reinstall is to first use a disk imaging utility(search in Google and you will find plenty of them) to make an exact image of a hard disk and restore the image back to its healthy state. What I am aware is that Dell computers are preloaded with Factory-created Recovery Image just as in my case where I can restore my system with a Ctrl+F11. I am not sure with other computer brands but I guess those newer computers should have this feature pre-installed now.

I have also tried out with the Backup and Restore utility from Windows XP but it did not work out as intended in my case, despite after setting several restore points successfully but I failed to restore any when disaster struck. However I haven’t have the chance to try out the XP advanced backup utility where you can backup the entire system but be prepare to spend more than an hour depending on the disk capacity of your computer.

Another info is that Windows Vista Business, Ultimate, and Enterprise come with Windows Complete PC Backup and Restore that allows you to create an image-based backup of your computer that can be used to restore your entire PC environment, including the operating system, installed programs, user settings and data files.

By: Tomaz

Tomaz — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 07:20:59 +0000

Perhaps I have phrased my question incorrectly. I was wondering if you had found any solution that would NOT involve reformat and reinstall of the system?

By: Caty

Caty — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 02:34:45 +0000

I have bookmarked this site: cyberwalker.com/topic/36#ref-rein-win95, where there are details of reformat and reinstall the Windows system. Hope this help.

By: Tomaz

Tomaz — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 18:06:26 +0000

I was just wondering, have you actually come across any alternative solution to a system reinstall ? I poked around ZoneLabs forums and Google, but didn’t find any relevant pages.

Best regards