Customer Reviews
Essentially the same as versions 5 and 6.
McAfee's Personal Firewall Plus version 5.0 was almost unilaterally panned by everyone who reviewed it.^M
Terrible, read review for details...
Some friends of mine told me about McAfee Personal Firewall Plus 2006 Version 7.0 and said how great it was and easy it is. Well, it sounded very good on the website and so forth, but when I got it installed on my PC, it was running fine. The protection it provides is great, don't get me wrong. But, when I tried visiting a website I had an error. And when I started browsing more and more using Microsoft Internet Explorer, I noticed a very slow "browsing" experience. Everything was very very slow at loading, sometimes IE would freeze, or not even load the website and say "The page cannot be displayed". ^M
Good Firewall protection for the average Windows XP user
I have been using Zone Alarm (free version) and Zone Alarm Pro for many years on my desktop systems but I recently decided to purchase and test the latest McAfee Personal Firewall Plus 2006 Version 7.0 for use on my older and slower Pentium 3 1Ghz notebook running Windows XP Home. It is well known that Zone Alarm (ZA) and Zone Alarm Pro (ZAP) is one of the most effective Windows based software firewalls you can put on your computer. However ZA also has the ability to be a very unfriendly and frustrating security program if you are a non-technical computer user and if you do not have a basic knowledge of software firewalls. In addition to inbound and outbound firewall monitoring the latest Zone Alarm 6 has included an extremely effective but unfortunately more confusing triple defense system which protects your Windows operating system from virus and spyware attacks. The problem with ZA is the increased number of firewall alerts that pop up and ask the computer user a many highly technical questions regarding whether to approve or not approve programs for access through the firewall. For this and other various reasons I probably would not recommend Zone Alarm version 6 at this point in time unless you have a very experienced computer tech person to help you set it up and work through the program's "training phase" after installation. I am sure that in the near future the next ZAP version updates will improve but as of this review the latest Zone Alarm Pro (version 6.0.631.003) can be a challenge for most people except the more advanced computer users. ^M
