Zone Alarm Extreme Security 2010

Zone Alarm Extreme Security 2010 is the security firm’s most comprehensive collection to date, combining virus protection, a powerful firewall and all of the tools necessary to protect users during day-to-day PC use and when browsing the internet.

All of these components are well organised in an interface that will be familiar to users of previous versions, and Zone Alarm is still up there with the best in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.

Costing £10 more than Zone Alarm Internet Security the Extreme edition adds backup, tune-up and encryption tools, among others.

Perhaps the most interesting of those is the hard disk encryption software for laptops, designed to protect your files in the event that your portable computer is lost or stolen. This must be installed separately from the rest of the program, as must the online backup and tune-up tools. It would have been nice to see all three of these tools integrated into the main suite to keep things tidy.

Regardless, the add-on was quick and easy to install, though it does require that users register their details with Zone Alarm, and sets up a secure username and password through which to access the computer. Disk encryption can take quite a long time to process but when it’s done the files on the disk are protected against prying eyes.

Further improvements centre around improving existing security, with a number of enhancements made to browser security to counter new online threats, and faster and more efficient scans. The latter was particularly noticeable: in our tests Zone Alarm Extreme 2010 was around 50 per cent quicker to complete scans than the previous version, with little impact on performance during the process.

These improvements are commendable, but it was a little disappointing not to see a refresh of the interface and it’s a shame that the additional tools are not better integrated.

As such it’s not as pleasant to use as rivals such as Bitdefender and Norton 360. While we have no criticism of the amount of protection Zone Alarm provides to its users, those who want a more approachable program should opt for a rival instead.