ZoneAlarm & Online Gaming.

[Wee]

Anyone else have a problem with ZoneAlarm Pro and playing games online?

I remeber a while back when i got ZoneAlarm, and began experiencing lag spikes when playing online. Wasn't to sure what it was at first, but after a good bit of digging around i discovered it was ZoneAlarm. Whenever i disabled it or ran another Firewall, the spike lags disappeared.

I've recently been looking for a new Internet Security, and since it had been while since i'd had ZoneAlarm installed, i thought i'd give it another go and hope thise mysterious problem has gone. Sadly, however, it hasn't.

I've tried everything i think it could in ZoneAlarm, but still no luck. Really hoping there is a solution to this issue, because ZoneAlarm is an excellent Security Suite.

Anyone got any ideas?

 

[MarcLister]

LA spikes? What are they? I once had a problem with HL2 not loading up properly, there was nothing to hint as to what was wrong, until I did a CTRL-ALT-DEL and saw a ZA tab asking for Internet permissions. I just exited HL2 and added HL2.exe to the allowed tab and gave it high trust etc.

I don't know exactly what your problem is since the term "la spikes" doesn't sound familiar to me, but I think you just need to make sure you've pre-allowed gaming exe's to have a certain level of trust on their access to the Internet.

Hope this helps, if it doesn't can you supply more info about the problems?

 

[Wee]

Looks like my over-sized fingers missed some keys when typing, that was supposed to be Lag Spikes.

Basically, every 30-40 seconds after joining a game my ping will shoot up to around 300-ish and cause a few seconds of lag. Then everything will go back to normal for another 30-40 seconds.

I've given every a high trust level, so that doesn't seem to be the issue. The only thing i can think of is that ZoneAlarm is somehow delaying the transfer of packets, and its causing the connection to dip in and out.


Cheers for the response.

 

[georges]

I kill ZA before gaming. It is a p.o.s imo. Really poor, even if you unblock a prog permanently, it goes to @70%cpu(zone alarm) when you start playing ..

 

[Gatsby]

I had exactly the same problem with ZoneAlarm and counterstrike. Everything would run fine for 10 seconds or so, then all of a sudden I'd get a huge lag spike for a couple of seconds and then another 10 seconds of normality followed by another spike.

I couldn't work out any way to fix it so I just got rid of ZoneAlarm.

 

[Efour]

I have no idea why people use ZA, its possibly the crappiest firewall ive ever tried. You mayaswell just use XP in built firewall.

Try sygate personal firewall its free and it actually has a bit of user control to it.

 

[Wee]

I had exactly the same problem with ZoneAlarm and counterstrike. Everything would run fine for 10 seconds or so, then all of a sudden I'd get a huge lag spike for a couple of seconds and then another 10 seconds of normality followed by another spike.

I couldn't work out any way to fix it so I just got rid of ZoneAlarm.

Totally baffled me, too. Have just gone back to Kerio Firewall and NOD32 Anti-Virus. Awesome mix.

Cheers replies anyway, fella's.

 

[Gribs]

I used zone alarm for quite a while until one of the updates knackered my machine. I've being running Kerio for a couple of years now and haven't had any problems with it at all.

 

[zealot]

i use zone alarm never had this problem my pings in CS are around 5 on the servers i play on.

 

[wilders]

I just use the xp firewall, never had an issue with that...

 

[Xinn]

I use ZA also, never had any problems with lag spikes in CS nor in COD2, never had any problems with ZA at all actually.