Firewalls and the Internet

Last week I was contacted by a client who could not surf the web for more than 5 minutes after a booting up. The client is using Windows XP and the local cable provider for internet. The client had already contacted the provider and no solution was forth coming. This is a very interesting problem as networking problems go. No other networking issues were apparent, as the client only uses the network for sharing the internet.

Once on site, I experienced the problem for myself. The computer did, indeed, function with regards to internet web connectivity for a limited amount of time before failing. However, all other functions continued to work -- Ping, FTP, Telnet, DNS, etc. HTTP seemed to be the only internet service affected.

So, I broke out the poor man's monitor -- taskmgr.exe. After a few minutes, I saw something disturbing. There was a process that was appearing and disappearing. A reboot and quick search on Google told me that the process belonged to Zone Alarm. This was shocking, as there was no indication that Zone Alarm was loaded on the machine.

A trip to Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs confirmed that Zone Alarm was installed on the machine and the appearing/disappearing act told me that is definitely was not functioning properly. So, I uninstalled Zone Alarm and suddenly IE and Firefox were surfing again. So, I verified that the Windows Firewall was active and the job was complete.

Now, I am a proponent of firewalls and Zone Alarm is a good product. However, Zone Alarm to my mind is overkill in a local network behind a NAT router. For the most part, the firewall built in to XP will work just fine when used with antivirus and passive protection.

So, if you are suffering do to internet lag or your machine is just plain slow, you might try uninstalling all unnecessary filter/protection software and go the minimalist approach:

1. Good AV program -- I prefer the free version of Antivir Antivirus
2. Good passive protection --Spybot Search & Destroy (without resident protection) and Spyware Blaster
3. Firewall -- Windows built-in Firewall