Why so slow before I can get on the Web?

[liam858]

And is the XP Firewall good enough?

On XP, no, not by itself, as it is only one-way. The built-in Vista firewall takes care of traffic both inbound and outbound, the XP firewall does not.


Liam

[SuperSparks]

Though I question how much that is really worth. All it does is alert you to an already infected machine "phoning home". Useful, but not essential IMO, it's better not to get infected in the first place. Provided you are aware that it won't alert you to suspicious outbound traffic, the the XP firewall is perfectly adequate, though I would much prefer to use it in conjunction with a router that at least has NAT on it, or better still a proper SPI firewall. The Windows firewall then becomes a second line of defence, for which it is just fine.

[COPO]

Why did I not have this problem with my last PC which was a P4 clone compared to this Dell?

[Train]

Dell - maybe the answer.

[SuperSparks]

Why did I not have this problem with my last PC which was a P4 clone compared to this Dell?

Different drivers, different software. That's the problem with ZA, it doesn't get on with everything that it has to co-exist with.

[Ridgerunr]

You didn't say,but if you have the latest version of ZA,you might want to drop back a notch or two. I run XP-Pro,sp2 with CA's eTrust and use vers.6.0.667 of ZA with few problems and good speed. You can get the older versions at old version.com if you'd like to give that a try.

It's also a good idea to clean out the DHCP cache occasionally also. Just go into Network Connections,doubleclick the LAN connection icon>click on support tab>click the 'repair' button then re-boot. This can speed your connection up considerably...

[COPO]

Thx. I removed ZA and installed Rogers Yahoo Online Protection that's offered for free.