Microsoft kills ZoneAlarm (and my PC with it!)
I’ve just sent the day without any internet connection. No, this was not some new spiritual discipline, (though perhaps I should do it more often) it was the result of a loss of broadband connection. After several hours rebooting my router and reconfiguring my PC, I resorted to my ISP’s technical support line, only to discover that it was all Microsoft’s fault.
Last night MS update KB951748 was downloaded and ever so helpfully installed. This morning - no internet. This is when you discover how good your ISP is. When I did finally resort to their help line, a recorded alert message pointed out the problem and suggested a solution - un-install the update, grab a fix form ZoneAlarm and you are back in business. Brilliant!
The solution is documented online too, but how do you know if you can’t get online? If you are reading this, I guess you either don’t have ZoneAlarm or have fixed your PC. But I wonder how many thousands of people are tonight sat without an internet connection, cursing their ISP and reconfiguring their PCs. And I wonder how many ISPs have not themselves discovered the solution. Did your ISP immediately identify the problem, like good old Eclipse?
On days like this you realise just how much you rely on the internet. I couldn’t pay my credit card bill which is due; or my gas bill. I couldn’t respond to the several e-mails sat in my inbox requiring responses from me. I couldn’t search for any pictures for this week’s sermon or check the usual techie forums for a fix for my PC.
All thanks to Mr Bill Gates who is now happily retired on his fortunes made from our misery.
If you haven’t installed KB951748 yet, make sure you update ZoneAlarm first.
Would this be an opportune moment to suggest switching to Ubuntu?
I’ve been a happy user since 2005 (2 and a half years now) and I have only had one major outage, and that is when I unplugged it during an upgrade.
The latest release works out of the box, I’ve got 7 computers running it and only 3 now on windows (one of those is the presentation machine in church, though we’re contemplating migrating that).
‘cmon Tim…. I can hear the voice calling you…. “Tim, leave your windows and follow me…..”
I would but the only thing is that I have got a few hefty applications for video/3d/music work that I’ve invested in over the years that run on windows. For these I have to run windows. A couple of them have Mac versions, but I’m kind of stuck. A couple of open source apps are beginning to mature that might take their place, but they aren’t there yet.
For an office PC and for doing presentations etc, Ubuntu is great.
I had the same problem and I worked around the problem by lowering the ZoneAlarm Internet Zone security level to Medium.
But I would go to ZoneAlarm now to look for the fix.
how about ubuntustudio? I hhave done a little video and found it ok, but then I had only used free stuff on windows. You could dual boot of course. I suppose it depends how often you use your music and video.