Connie's Ramblings

For the past several days I’ve noticed that Windows Security Center wasn’t happy with my ZoneAlarm Extreme Firewall/Anti-virus/Anti-spyware on my Vista Laptop. It kept trying to tell me that I didn’t have a Firewall running and to turn on Window’s Firewall – blahk! Typically the fix for this is to just turn off and re-turn on ZoneAlarm. So last night I gave that a try and found it didn’t work.. Looking deeper I also found “ZoneAlarm Extreme Anti-virus is on, but is reporting its status to Windows Security in a format that is no longer supported. Use the program’s automatic updating feature, or contact the program manufacturer for an updated version”.

I tried doing an update within ZoneAlarm and it told me my version was current and that no update was available… ok… did a search on the net for the issue and while I found a couple people having the same problem I found no solution.

Next I decided to go directly to ZoneAlarm.com to see if there was an update. Sure enough the current version of ZoneAlarm Extreme Security is 9.0.083.xxx. I was running 8.0.298.xxx. Apparently, ZoneAlarm can not find this update within the program itself via either automatic update or manual update (Open ZoneAlarm > On the bottom ‘Quick Tasks’ > Check for updates) You can however download it directly from ZoneAlarm.com by mousing over (do not click) “Download & Buy” > select “Free Downloads” > download the appropriate trial version.

I have rarely had success with upgrading ZA over the previous ZA settings so I uninstalled my old version and installed the new and re-set up my programs etc and now Windows Security Center is happy again… Even with uninstalling, the lience key did not need to be reinstalled, it transferred just fine.