Figure 1.
2. Overview of the GUI
I will assume that ZoneAlarm has already been downloaded and installed, so I won't cover the installation procedure. Once the program is installed and the system is rebooted, you should see in your system tray an icon like the one pointed by the arrow in Figure 1 (an alternate icon, not shown here, made by the letters ZA in white on a split red-and-yellow background, may appear instead). If you don't see the ZoneAlarm icon, you probably have configured ZoneAlarm not to launch automatically at startup. If this is the case, then start it manually.
Figure
1.
We will notice that this icon is divided in two parts that looks like meters. The green part is your download meter, and it will show activity whenever your machine sends data to the network. The red part is the upload meter, and it will show activity whenever you receive data from the network. If we double-click on it, we will see it pop up to a window like the one in Figure 1.1. This is the compact mode, where we can see the upload/download meters, a lock in unlocked state, a STOP button and a small area where programs using the network connections are displayed (in the case of Figure 1.1, none). There is also the Help button at the far right.
Figure
1.1
Under this part, we see 5 buttons, each one corresponding to a section that will be covered in the following chapters, namely Alerts, Lock, Security, Programs and Configure. On the lower right-hand corner, under the Configure button, we see a small arrow pointed down. If we click on this arrow, or on one of the buttons, this will expand the ZoneAlarm window like we see in Figure 1.2.
Figure
1.2.
At the very bottom of the screen, we see a status message about the last action done by ZoneAlarm, and on the far right an arrow pointed up to put ZoneAlarm back in compact mode again, as we have seen in Figure 1.1. This info will show in every screen. To minimize ZoneAlarm to our task bar, we click on "_" icon on the upper right-hand corner, and to put it back to our system tray, we click on the "X" icon just beside it.
3. Overview of the "Alerts" screen