Hey guys!

So I've heard that AVG antivirus free edition is expiring in february. My parents computer had AVG and we wanted to get an alternate solution. I said that our ISP is offering a free zone alarm security suite program on thier website. While i was away my dad downloaded and isntalled the free zone alarm (ZA) firewall. I said lets uninstall this free version and get the better suite version (anti virus, spyware, firewall, etc).

So we downloaded the free suite from the ISP. Eventually, they said they didnt really like the ZA suite so i unistalled it and put avg back on untill they make up thier mind.

My dad recently bought a x1650 pro, and we were running COD2 on pretty much full graphics at about 20-25 frames per second.

After this whole ZA thing the game is barely playable at low settings, it is not only COD2 though, counter stirke source is also very slow...

I tried the doing what the ZA people said here
http://download.zonelabs.com/bin/m [...] 1_help.pdf
(goto trouble shooting and manual unistall)

Couldnt find the folders it said would be there, and there is nothing in the internet logs folder.

Have you guys seen any of this before and is zone alarm the actual problem. Nothing else has been done really to this computer recently besides what i explained.

Any help would be appreciated!!

The nasty part is that the places you need to go and clean are like the zonealarm manual tried to explain. You could start with an afternoon of system cleaning and scanning to see what issues you are up against. Get ATF-Cleaner here http://www.atribune.org/content/view/25/2/ and run it. And get ccleaner here http://www.ccleaner.com/ and run it, use the cleaner and issues, remove anything they find. Then use the microsoft disk cleaner, and clean everything it finds along with, clean up restore points also. Then do a disk defrag, the machine should be a little more responsive now. Then go online and do a scan from www.safety.live.com and www.trendmicro.com and kill and or clean anything they find.
Let me know how it goes!

Oh, and for your parents and AVG. After you have uninstalled avg 7.1 you could go get AVG 7.5 and still be running what they are used to. And none of them will protect you from everything. Have you heard of or ran Hitman Pro before?

Before you go and clear out all your old restore points I'd try and restore you PC to a time when you still had AVG 7.1 on it and started messing with ZoneAlarm and other stuff.

After you restore to that point verify that your games and stuff are working properly, then follow CowboyTech's advice and uninstall AVG Free 7.1 and INSTALL AVG Free 7.5

I've never used ZA but have you tried disbling the auto-scans?.. auto file scan, firewall etc. ZA might be trying to scan all data before execution. Alternatively, turn it off during gameplay.

I dunno if this will effect you,,but,,I had AVG 7.5 and it snafu'd tried to reinstall no luck it asked for a serial/password ??? HUH !! WTF !! I thought,so after some mucking about I reinstalled 7.1 and then 7.5,A OK now ..

Hey guys.. Just wanna let you know that i am still here and am in the process of doing all you said.

I tired to restore to before i installed Zone alarm when it happened but i could not. ?? really wierd.

tryed a few different dates still no luck.

So i took off AVG (i had 7.1) and put the new one on. I ran all those cleaners and stuff.. im in the process of running the micro trend scan.

Will edit/post again when i try a game and all that stuff. defrag added a bit of performace.

EDIT: So the game is running alot better now. The load times now take minutes less and the games run near full graphics again. Thanks for the help you guys. I guess it just had a bunch of crud on there that needed to come off.