Karthik Nataraaj

System Maintenance & ZoneAlarm 7.0 problems

April 19th, 2007

I had been quite busy last couple weeks and couldn’t find time to blog. Lot of interesting things happened and I’ll blog about them here.

Last Sunday I was about to blog, but got struck with my system. My 80GB Hard drive is not large enough to fulfill my needs and almost 85% of the drive was filled with my softwares, music, e-learning and reference materials. The performance of the system was badly hit by this and I decided to clean up my system before its too late.

First I prepared a list of all the important files, which are need to be written it a DVD before doing anything. I burnt all the files which were taking space in the hard disk to give my system some breathing space first. One by one I finished the list but still I didn’t feel any noticeable performance boost in the system. So I downloaded and installed the windows registry cleaning software Registry Mechanic to clean the registry. It scanned my complete registry and showed around 300 errors. I just clicked the repair button which fixed all the errors in a second’s time.

Since I hadn’t done defragmentation for more than 6 months, I started the process and it took about 5 hours to finish. After doing it, I got a notification from ZoneAlarm that a new version had released and prompted me to upgrade.

One thing I’ve never cared about is the antivirus problem, because of the great software package ZoneAlarm Security Suite which takes care of the security department of my system. I have been using ZoneAlarm for more than 4 years and it never failed to protect my system and gave me no problems at all.

As its a most trusted software of mine, I had no second thought about upgrading to the new 7.0 version. Happily, I upgraded the software and noticed that the logo of the software has changed and some layout changes. Everything looked perfect till I rebooted the system.

How to say..? I received a strange error message whenever a file is opened and also the system restarted randomly. I was terribly shocked and felt that something had gone wrong in the maintenance session. Since ZoneAlarm is in my favorite zone, my first suspicion was in the Registry cleaning software which was installed just before I upgraded ZoneAlarm. So I restored all the changes made in the registry using the same software but still the error messages didn’t disappear.

The error appeared whenever a file was accessed and that gave a small hint about the antivirus, because only the antivirus softwares have the nature of checking a file whenever its accessed. Then I started to suspect the new version of zonealarm I upgraded and googled about the problem. I guessed it right, lot of people who installed the new version had the same problem and hot discussions were going in the message boards and some blog comments.

Suddenly uninstalled the ZoneAlarm Security suite 7.0 version and installed my old-gold 6.5 version. Everything worked again and things went back normally. I’m not even going to think of upgrading zonealarm until a solid bugfree version releases. Although it’s a simple problem, it gave me mental worry before finding out the issue.

Thus goes my system maintenance session and now I can see some good difference in my system performance.

I’ve bought a new 5.1 speaker system and will write more about it in my next post.

Entry Filed under: Personal, Computing