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Malwarebytes and Zonealarm


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:huh: Hi

A warning and a question.

I recently got a drive-by infection from a scam security suite. It somehow walked past Zonealarm full and Spybot SD, and proved very difficult to remove. Eventually I installed mbam which removed it without trouble. I was so impressed that I bought the pro version.

After I had installed the key, my computer suddenly started to take over half an hour to boot, and after a few reboots it stopped booting at all except in safe mode. I uninstalled mbam completely but without improvement. I tried a system restore but it would invariably crash half way though. I then saw a comment on IBM's site to the effect that Zonalarm had a bad habit of crashing system restore. I then uninstalled ZA and everything worked perfectly.

I then reinstalled mbam and not only does everything work perfecly, but the boot time is vastly improved and in all matters affecting the filing system the computer is literally twice as fast. Despite having 198 days left on my ZA subscription, I have no wish to reinstall it.

The problem is not, as I first thought, with mbam. It is with Zonealarm. Having wasted a great deal of time on this (and very nearly reinstalling my OS in despair), my warning is therefore that if you run Zonealarm and you install mbam, uninstall ZA first, or at very least disable it. You will save yourself a lot of heartache.

My question is this. Having used ZA for about eight years, I have become ignorant about security software. If I run mbam in conjunction with Spybot is that adequate to provide a sufficient degree of security or am I missing some vital component of protection. Any views about this would be gratefully received.

sprice86

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You need an antitvirus program as well as Malwarebytes/Spybot, but you will find that there will be some slow down if you are using AV+Malwarebytes+Spybot

First, if you no longer use ZoneAlarm you should clean up its residue by running the ZoneAlarm clean tool

http://download.zonealarm.com/bin/free/support/cpes_clean.exe

Download it and run it (run as administrator in Vista or 7)

If you want a free AV, Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) or AVG free are a couple of suggestions. If you choose MSE then you could consider removing Spybot (the Tea-timer function in Spybot may conflict with MSE)and just use MSE and Malwarebytes.

You also need to follow the instructions here to avoid conflicts with your AV and Malwarebytes

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i use full malwarebytes and mse my self avg has a habit of spitting out false positives and if you play wow every single patch it will spit out a false positive and delete the whole wow folder

my only other suggestion besides mse is avast

i used avast along side malwarebytes before switching to mse

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Hi sprice86,

I have to agree somewhat with fivealive's advice. If you want to run a free AV program, then I would go for MSE or Avast. I have previously used both of them, preferring

the latter, not only because it's a pretty good free AV but also, their community forum gives helpful friendly advice (a bit like MBAM's)!

If only Eset NOD32 was a free program sprice, I would thoroughly recommend it but unfortunately it isn't. I switched from Avast earlier this year and immediately noticed

how much quicker and responsive my OS was, in fact, I was so impressed that I recently migrated to Eset Smart Security which has also highly impressed me.

Cheers,

Brian67

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