Windows XP firewall

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roho said:
Point taken about user friendliness (but it works both ways ....those who want little configuration and those who want as much as possible).........but have you used anything else........and what about the True Vector problems......dont tell me you havent come across any problems with this crappy part of ZA (even Zone Labs OWN forums are full of this)?

If you do want to BUY a software firewall then I suppose that buying a router with a built in firewall is about a 1000 times more effective yet costs about the same...of course any firewall is only as good as its configured OR allowed to be configured, in the end.

Personally i've never had any problems w/ the true vector component. The majority of problems I've read on forums w/ people having issues with true vector is when they don't follow the directions for properly uninstalling ZA. However, i've run ZA only on a few machines so i can't say that it's 100% trouble free; i'm sure there are particular problems people have related to ZA.

That being said, i think sometimes computer novices are quick point blame at M$ or some software vendor when something doesn't work quite right. There's so many possible hardware combinations; configurations and when you try to run a piece of software that's supposed to be compatible with multiple OSes, it's almost inevitable that you will occasionally see some hiccups. If something performs the way it's supposed to 99% of the time, i'm certainly going to forgive the programmer for the 1% of the time that it might lock up/freeze/ whatever.

I have tried Tiny & Kerio. It was mainly because several years ago, i heard so many people b*tching and moaning about ZA being a resource hog that i decided to see just how much better Tiny & Kerio were in that regard. On a Dell 4100 machine, P III 866 MHz; with 256 MB RAM, I found that it wasn't any better and all 3 were very similar in terms of resource usage. That combined w/ the fact that all 3 passed the Shields Up test at GRC's website, i decided I would continue to use ZA simply for the fact that Tiny & Kerio really didn't offer any advantages over ZA.

TylerD, Kerio is another good firewall - esp. considering that it's free. Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean it's bad - so dont' be too skeptical about it. Whether it will run on your XP machine smoothly no one can tell you for sure - you will just have to install it and try it out for yourself. Without knowing the hardware & software specs on your Win ME machine compared to your XP PC, it's difficult to tell.
 
My problem with ZA was a True Vector initiation problem after reboot from a crash, so I've decided to go for Norton's Personal Firewall and see if its any better. Its part of their Internet Security 2004 package which was only £20 on E-Bay so I'll see how it goes. Thanks for your responses.
 
TylerD, i have not had any personal experience with Norton's Firewall. However, several months ago, i read a report on PC Magazine that's performance was subpar. Compared w/ the other ones they tested, it was not effective as ZoneAlarm and some others. It was not the first time that i had heard a negative remark against their FW software. Personally I think Norton should stick to what they do best (i.e. AV software) and stay out of the FW products.

If you don't want to use ZA, then try Outpost, Kerio or Tiny. I think Tiny has discontinued it's freeware version but the others still offer a freeware version available for download.
 
if you use p2p programs you may want to consider sygate. ZoneAlarm has commonly caused issues with connectivity and p2p.
 
That's because Kazaa is full of spyware crap. I've used ZoneAlarm with Kazaa Lite with absolutely no problems whatsoever.
 
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