>1flyfisher I used ZA firewall (free version) for a couple of years on various computers with both 100Mpbs and 128k connection speeds. Never had your problems. Pages opened in 1 to 3 seconds. But for other reasons I switched to COMODO and have used it with no problems whatsoever for a year or so now. I've found it to be as good as , if not better than, ZA. You might want to give it a try. http://www.comodo.com/index.html
Typically if it says AV it means anti-virus although some AV programs do some things that firewalls do. I would recommend just getting a router they are cheap and make sure it has NAT, you are good to go.
Upgrading the memory above 1Gb will not help much with your web page loading speeds relative to the firewall software. The folks at Dell were essentially correct. If you want to improve your download speeds then I would urge you to use an external hardware firewall router with NAT enabled, and remove ZA from your system. Best Regards, - Greg B.
Yes. Its true that more ram is not the solution. The solution is probably to rebuild your OS and apps from a reformatted C drive. You might want to dump vista and install xp while you're at it (put vista back on when MS gets up to SP2 as the stories about SP1 are not encouraging). This "my software firewall did bad things to me" reflects bad set up or internal software conflicts. (I see the tv program now "When good firewalls go bad" with a bunch of trailer trash white folks bemoaning the way their firewalls turned on them after years of care and abuse). I use comodo on my machine but zonealarm on the kids machines (less chirpy although its got less security). One of the kids machines is an 800MHz PIII. I can get full cable speed (17 Mbps) on any of those machines if the site at the other end is capable of supporting it. So its a config or conflict issue not a basic problem with the software firewall. And NAT (network address translation) is not a firewall ... you need a firewall of some form not NAT.
I took off comodo ( to chirpy) and put zone alarm on....kiwi, do you recommend disabling NAT on the router?