Curse

Nazo · Feb 18, 2006, 08:18 PM // 20:18

Just a little heads up for some of you. I was running ZoneAlarm because my stupid DSL modem's builtin NAT won't handle UDP packets correctly and have been having an annoying issue with GW where my controls would sometimes just kind of randomly freeze (game kept running, just acted like there was no input.) Also, it performed far worse on my X850XT PE than would make sense (I should be able to max every setting I have and this game run smoothly...) I had virus checking off, so it SHOULDN'T have been checking all data being loaded or anything. Well, after uninstalling ZoneAlarm, it's a bit soon to tell 100% for certain on the control issue, though it hasn't yet returned and probably would have by now (it's a little random, so I can't be sure) but, I can say my game is running far more smoothly than before. I've played a lot of games where ZoneAlarm never made a difference, but, after uninstalling it, GW runs better, so, I can only conclude that GW specifically doesn't like ZoneAlarm since none of my other games seem to run differently (unfortunately, this includes Need For Speed Most Wanted, which still stutters for reasons I have yet to track down or get a response from technical support on...)

I don't know if it's just one specific version, a few, or just ZoneAlarm in general, but, just a little heads up for you people who do use it. Uninstalling may or may not help GW run better. Just remember you have to have A firewall, so don't uninstall without a backup. (In my case, I just set my DSL's NAT to only route GW's TCP ports to my PC and turn off static NAT and I have an automatic firewall just because nothing else gets sent my way.)

Loviatar · Feb 19, 2006, 02:25 AM // 02:25

i have the zonealarm anti spyware version and have never had a problem with GW

i do have to shut down spysweeper as that produces the results you mentioned OR a hard crash and reboot

Nazo · Feb 19, 2006, 03:04 AM // 03:04

I have a suspicion that my version of ZoneAlarm may have been reading memory or something anyway and thus grabbing resources away from the game at an unexpected moment that the game didn't handle well. A spyware software could possibly do the same thing. This is just a suspicion though. I'll say one thing that is for certain. Before when I walked through that area with the huge crystal (just outside of the Serenity Temple) it used to drag to maybe 20 fps or so. Now it continues running as smoothly as silk.

lord_shar · Feb 19, 2006, 06:59 AM // 06:59

Have you tried running netstat -a to check what sort of outbound connections are currently established? This is a good way to check for potential, unidentified spyware and key loggers.

What about a hardware router/firewall? I'm currently using the D-Link DGL-4300, and it successfully blocked stuff ZoneAlarm kept logging alerts for. Another advantage of HW-rounter/firewalls is that they are immuned to most known buffer-overrun attacks.

Nazo · Feb 19, 2006, 07:51 AM // 07:51

I doubt any spyware have snuck past all the scans I do every now and then (especially when I noticed GW not doing so well) and the fact is I just don't install a lot of things that would have spyware. Besides, the fact remains that the problem went away when I removed ZoneAlarm... Anyway, I'm switching to a more hardware firewall. I have a second system that has some pretty old hardware. I've been using it for old games, as an HTPC, and so on. However, lately I haven't used it too much. I had set aside a partition for linux with the intentions of turning it into a server, but, back when I did that I was using it too much for the other things to turn it into a server. I've already installed FC4, I just have to get around to setting aside the time to learn how to set it up as a router later (plenty of howtos and such on iptables, but, it's not something you just pick up instantly normally.) It's not as good as a real hardware firewall, but, darned close, and a heck of a lot cheaper if you already have the second system.

Rayea · Feb 19, 2006, 10:54 AM // 10:54

nazo, just out of curiosity, you dont have norton running while you had zonealarm did you?
if you did, it was the two together..zonealarm and norton hate eachother with a venghence....
i once had them together and it mesed up my boards BIOS, no kidding....i had a 1600 athlon befor i used the update virus definintitons button, after, it was clocked at 1050...o.0

thelessa · Feb 19, 2006, 02:24 PM // 14:24

I use zonealarm (free ver.) and avg anti virus (free ver.), and they play together very nicely

aeroclown · Feb 19, 2006, 04:51 PM // 16:51

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nazo

I doubt any spyware have snuck past all the scans I do every now and then (especially when I noticed GW not doing so well) and the fact is I just don't install a lot of things that would have spyware. Besides, the fact remains that the problem went away when I removed ZoneAlarm... Anyway, I'm switching to a more hardware firewall. I have a second system that has some pretty old hardware. I've been using it for old games, as an HTPC, and so on. However, lately I haven't used it too much. I had set aside a partition for linux with the intentions of turning it into a server, but, back when I did that I was using it too much for the other things to turn it into a server. I've already installed FC4, I just have to get around to setting aside the time to learn how to set it up as a router later (plenty of howtos and such on iptables, but, it's not something you just pick up instantly normally.) It's not as good as a real hardware firewall, but, darned close, and a heck of a lot cheaper if you already have the second system.

If you are making a router, I would suggest you stay far away from FC in general there are far better distributions to use that are hardened. Id also stay away from mandriva aka mandrake linux.

http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=firewalls

Decent distros that are ment to be routers

Icop

http://www.ipcop.org/

MonoWall

http://www.m0n0.ch/wall/

SmoothWall

http://smoothwall.org/

Redwall (is ok)

http://www.redwall-firewall.com

TheSonofDarwin · Feb 19, 2006, 05:13 PM // 17:13

Quote:

Originally Posted by thelessa

I use zonealarm (free ver.) and avg anti virus (free ver.), and they play together very nicely

That's exactly what I use. I used to have a firewall that I paid for at an extreme discount from the college, but for the past 2 months I have been using zonealarm with no changes from how GW use to play. And, well, I've always used AVG ever since the 30-day (or was in 3-month) trial of Norton I had when I first brought my computer 3-4 years ago. Who would actually pay for Norton?

The only trouble ZoneAlarm gives me is everytime GW updates I get the message that GW.exe was changed and is trying to access the internet, so I have to re-allow it before it will allow it to load. Minor inconvenience.

JediKnight · Feb 19, 2006, 05:19 PM // 17:19

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheSonofDarwin

The only trouble ZoneAlarm gives me is everytime GW updates I get the message that GW.exe was changed and is trying to access the internet, so I have to re-allow it before it will allow it to load. Minor inconvenience.

I actually find that reassuring. Lets me know that I am well protected!

HDS · Feb 19, 2006, 05:44 PM // 17:44

I have ZA security suite, no problems yet (except when scan decided to kick in as i was about to cast prot spirit again.

Nazo · Feb 19, 2006, 06:37 PM // 18:37

I had that where it pestered me about GW.EXE every time an update occured, but, the funny thing is that I set it to trusted and told it that GW.EXE changes frequently, so it wasn't supposed to keep pestering. Anyway, I just had ZoneAlarm and nothing else. No norton, no resident spyware or antivirus programs (I run manual scans and don't tolerate resident programs since they are very bad for gaming.) I'm thinking that, more than anything else, the problem was with that particular version. Well, either way, I've been meaning to set up the other computer as a server for a while, and it's better than ZoneAlarm. More efficient and all. My CPU is more than enough for games like GW, but, the fact is that ZoneAlarm is going to grab cycles away, and games aren't made to handle that. It's not so much that they'd have less cycles as that they'd have unexpected less cycles (they use high resolution timers a lot for things such as sound/etc where timing is important.) The fact is, I'm always finding out that version so-an-so of ZoneAlarm has troubles with x and y games and, besides, even when it doesn't, it's just so much more efficient to have an external firewall that I'd recommend hardware routers (preferably real ones) to anyone who can actually afford them.

Anyway, as for the router, FC is my best choice. See, I'm no linux guru, so I can't do any of the REALLY complicated stuff first of all and wanted something semi-easy. I don't really understand why you say stay away from Mandriva though. It has that nice security suite that actually goes a bit into the paranoid area where it even maintains file/link permissions and such manually. If it's not secure, I'm not sure what is. Really I wanted Mandriva, but, it has some kind of bug in the installer and refuses to continue because it can't find "hdlists." Works fine on my normal PC, so it just doesn't like this hardware, which brings me to another point. Any distro I use has to work on this ancient pre-ACPI SMP hardware. FC4 seems to work fine, and while it's maybe not the best choice in the world, it's easy and I can use it. Of course, I plan to disable the worst security things later, and I've already disabled XDM (I turned off remote login, but, really I just don't need XDM at all so turned it off too.) Remember, I'm not looking to turn the system into a router and nothing at all else. I want to be able to use it on occasion to play videos, listen to music, etc (if I can figure out how to get this peice of crap Via Envy24 soundcard to work.) I even plan to run a few servers like Apache on it later.

SaucE · Feb 21, 2006, 12:21 PM // 12:21

ZA = Evil

I use a D-link router and have never had issues. I aggree with aeroclown with the linux version of firewalls. I tried doing it with a FC4 install + Firestarter. Worked good but FC was a hog on my AMD 500 w/ 192MB RAM. I used IPCop oo, worked much better. Switched to the router so I could have wireless for my laptop.

Nazo · Feb 21, 2006, 12:52 PM // 12:52

Ok, turns out ZA may not have been the culprit. Turns out post-processing had somehow disabled itself without telling me. It's a bit shocking that GW at any settings can bring an X850XT PE 256MiB to it's knees, but, it is running at 1440x1080x32 with maximum quality settings in both the control panel and game with FSAA and AF, so I guess it's not purely a shock that certain things -- especially parts which will be post-processed even more -- should slow things down a bit. As for the controls freezing issue, well, that occured again just recently shortly before I noticed that post-processing had somehow switched off and been off for a while (amazing I didn't notice all this time, but, I know it's been like that for a good while.) Unfortunately, tech support is just stalling with "by the book" type answers such as "defrag your harddrive and set swap size to 2048-4096MB" and we all know that any game that needs that much swap has serious design flaws, especially when physical system ram is 1GiB of DDR410 low latency (ok not really, it's supposed to be DDR400 high latency, but, it's UTT BH5 and my motherboard's voltage won't go up high, but, does enough for that pitiful overclock.) BTW, I found a driver that lets me use a linux swap partition, so my windows swap runs on a dedicated partition not used for anything else that is precicely 0.00% fragmented, and it gets wiped on every restart so it's completely clean again. They are just using stalling tactics hoping I'll go away because it's a rare problem possibly only with one user and they don't want to deal with it *sigh*. At least they ANSWER me though. I still haven't heard back from EA on the NFS:MW issues (btw, I've heard that someone experienced the stuttering on a 7800GT in NFS:MW, so it's something they really need to look into already...)

BTW, FC4 seems to be running smoothly enough at the moment. One thing to bear in mind is that this IS a SMP system with what, for the time, was tons of ram (512MB -- still tolerable today,) so it multitasks almost like a P3-1GHz. Mind you, I haven't really done anything to push the limits with single-task yet. No DVD watching or anything since I still have no sound (replacing this utter peice of crap which I actually lack words to describe from Via with a peice of crap $20 soundcard that is still 500x better and uses a CMedia chip, which I know will work in linux or they need to just start saying "now no longer works with most common sound-chips" on the front pages for every distro.)