[Japo]

I said that the bottom line hasn't changed much, but I'll correct myself. It must be much easier programming for Windows than it was for DOS. But nowadays programmers are lazier. The games from the early 90s were coded in assembly, and later in extremely optimized low-level C. Take a look at the system requirements for Microprose's early 3D flight simulators of the late 80s (I'm talking about 4.77 MHz). And assembly programmers were later bewildered that Doom could have been coded in C and still run on a 486. Now high-level C++ is too low-level for most programmers. Take a look at the system requirements for some amateur freeware FPS that are technically inferior to Doom. Nowadays programmers want to code with one hundredth of the effort neccesary for the same technical result they would have got in 1990, and consequently they're way farther away from the way the computers actually work deep down.

Of course they're damn right. There's no point in optimizing to death if it doesn't add value (like in the OS, browser, etc.). The only reason why things are like this is because there's hardware capable of running advanced 3D games programmed in high-level code.

And about the popups, I forgot to say that the "set and forget" approach of scheduling tasks (or letting programs do it) is overrated because it doesn't always result in "sit and relax". You schedule tasks so that you don't have to worry about them, but then you discover that they're a bigger annoyance than if you had to perform them yourself, because they interrupt your normal usage of the computer. Scheduling tasks is useful when you have a very regular schedule yourself, for example you schedule the computer at work to perform a scan for virus or a defrag when you know you'll be out having a coffee everyday. But at home it's impossible to impose yourself a fixed schedule, unless of course you schedule stuff for times when you're at work or sleeping, but then the computer must be on.

EDIT: Oops EoF's post wasn't there before. :P
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But EoF, what does ZA exactly do? Or you don't even know because the computer becomes irresponsive? Have you tried creating blocking rules so that ZA doesn't popup any longer asking if it should allow or block? If you can't create the rule because you don't know which app tries to access, try this: block all traffic in ZA, then run the game, then consult ZA's log and see which app tried to access at that time, then create a rule to block that app. The info could make it to ZA's log even if you had to reset before being able to consult it.