Pass Me The Bottle, Igor

Being a mere mortal and not an IT professional with thousands of servers and Tbytes of disk lying around,  I don’t often get to actually play around with the software vendors pitch to me. That’s why I was intrigued when Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. –famous for their ZoneAlarm firewall -- briefed me on ZoneAlarm ForceField, which virtualizes the Web browser to isolate it from the rest of your PC or notebook and keep the browser from sneaking malware onto your system.

The kind folks at CheckPoint pointed me to their free trial and I was off and running, feeling like a real cutting edge type. But soon thereafter, like a character in a horror movie who wishes he hadn’t drunk the Secret Potion, I began getting mysterious system slowdowns and crashes. Since my system had been incredibly buggy anyway, I uninstalled and reinstalled ForceField several times to see if it was the culprit. When the problems returned with each installation, I had had enough and returned to the mundane world of applications running right in Windows.

My other concern was that I was never really sure how much ForceField was protecting me from. It did show me, on request, how much extraneous data it kept off my system (90Mytes in several days) as well as how many exploits it had blocked. But given the performance problems it seemed to cause, that was small comfort. 

Suffice it to say I’m staying out of the lab for now, at least where my everyday work system is concerned. My advice for desktop virtualization vendors is first, do no harm to my system, and second, make a really convincing case of what you’re saving me from.