firewall

[STEELERGLENN]

hey guys should i have a fire-wall on my system? if so which is the best free one

 

[john3]

windows.

 

[Jby]

Zone alarm is reasonable, but personally I use Sygate Personal Firewall and wouldn't swap it for anything.

 

[strugglin]

I reckon a firewall is a must nowadays - My wife uses Zone alarm and it's very good - always checking if a site wants to access the internet - it can be downloaded at either of these two sites:-
www.panicware.com or www.zonelab.com just get the free personnal programme - it's OK.


Ian

 

[STEELERGLENN]

thank you

 

[IBMan]

I like zonealarm, however if you have high speed internet and an old 386 laying around, i would use a hardware firewall if possible such as ipcop or smoothwall.

 

[keithmitchell]

Hi, I've found Ad-Aware the best by far, it's an alrounder, and will often detect virus and spyware including Alexa, unless you are a user of Alexa, and I might add what one doesn't pick up the other will during a scan. I find if I update AVG before Ad-aware I have no problems with AVG running a disk scan, but I'm only running Win98SE. Perhaps WINXP has better software inbuilt, but particularly the Windows SP1 vers of IE6 for XP which my friends have had trouble with. Only an opinion, but there it is.

 

[strugglin]

Good point about Ad-Aware Keith, I use that as well and it seems to be OK - I'm also using windows 98se.

Ian

 

[MrCoffee]

A firewall of some description is as essential as a CPU if you're on the net. With out any firewall your PC will be infected within 20 minutes of connecting.

Sygate is ok as a basic firewall but it fails dismally to stop todays viruses, a trojan can pretty much dial straight out and download some friends for a party without sygate even blinking.
Also its not too smart in blocking infected apps either, making it next to useless.

Zonealarm is ok, gets the job done mostly but even a halfassed hacker could walkstraight past it.

Outpost is sweet and I believe there is a free version, it covers pretty much all the bases.

Kerio is like the atomic bomb in your arsenal in the firewall world, it takes down everything, your computer so much as sneezes and kerio is all over it. However the over zelousness of kerio means you *can* experiance problems with bits of your operating system being shutdown, apps not running properly, and general BSOD goodness.

Personally I would recommend using Firefox with plugins (flash blocker, java script blocker, ad blocker), outpost firewall, and a good antivirus solution such as Kaspersky or NOD32 alongside Spybot, spywareblaster, Adaware and hijackthis.

 

[keithmitchell]

Good point about Ad-Aware Keith, I use that as well and it seems to be OK - I'm also using windows 98se.

Ian

Strugglin, I agree with Mr Coffee, to some extent, but I've found Firefox takes over your system to some extent, and it's hard to get rid of eventually, and restore your installation to give you the freedom that most users want. Mind, i'm not saying it's not good, but you might have some conflicts with your IE version (6.SP1) trying to be the default browser. That's why I removed firefox, and stuck to the basics. I thought with W98SE, IE6SP1 it's probably more stable, taking into account the other firewalls and ad blockers firefox gives you, that is if you dont uninstall the others and only use firefox. But if you do you will still need a good free antivirus , and I think that's AVG