eTrust EZ Armor 2005

Anyone who has followed our advice to install the free firewall ZoneAlarm will find EZ Armor’s firewall program oddly familiar. It is essentially the same program with
a different colour scheme. The protection is similarly robust and there is a wealth of options, making it extremely easy to configure and vastly superior to the Windows
firewall.

But the firewall is only half of this security package, the other being the anti-virus program. It includes the ability to scan on demand or scan at scheduled dates and times, as well as realtime protection, checking files as they are used, and email messages as they come in. Like all paid-for virus scanners it includes automatic updates, although these only last for the length of the subscription (one year’s coverage is included with the product initially).

This is a good pairing of programs – both are unobtrusive but effective, sitting in the background until called into action. We had a small problem when installing the program – it froze while installing the firewall part, and we had to restart the computer, but it worked fine the second time around.

Although the name eTrust might not be familiar, it is a brand of the enormous business software maker Computer Associates, and this is the product’s first foray into the UK. Despite the absence of special features such as spyware protection, this is a good choice of program.