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Best Firewall for XP and XP64bit?
Posted by Sampson I share your lament. Anyway, rather than just looking at a software firewall, you really have to think of "defense in depth." If you are using broadband, your first purchase is not a software firewall but a router. Many routers now have their own firewall software that you can configure with no need to have an additional software firewall. Your machine will certainly run faster that way. Having said that, and the addition of a software firewall may be like using a belt and suspenders, I use a software firewall to protect me from my own stupidity. Many routers will disallow most incoming packets, but do not necessarily impede outgoing packets, which, of course, is what bots and trojans do once they are installed. And, we get those varmints from installing software that we find interesting on the net. After this, you will want to install anti-virus and anti-spyware software. Sygate probably is still one of the best. As to being "old", on one of my machines I am still using a very old version of Tiny. Port blocking sounds like rocket science, but they are just ports. Down to cases - if you are on broadband, many of these ISP's will provide you with free software that they have arranged with some company. For example, many Road Runner ISP's use CA's EZ Firewall, Anti-Virus, and PestPatrol. The reason - it is cheaper to give away free software than to have their techs overwhelmed with people calling in because they have clogged their computers with viruses, trojans and spyware that have brought their computers to their knees and they can't figure out why their high internet speed has slowed to a crawl. As I understand ZoneAlarm's problem, it has to do with vsmon.exe and the size that it grows to and the instability that results. Sorry that your computer got clobbered, but for the most part, they've had good results. Since you have decided to abandon them, and since you seem to be allergic to Symantec, you would probably also be advese to McAfee since like Norton's it gets a tad bit territorial with your system. As a suggestion - AVG now provides a Firewall in addition to their anti-virus software. I believe Ad-aware also provides a firewall as part of their premium package. One you might look at is Outpost. To me (and I am no software tester) it seems to do an above average job. As to your last comment that with all the spectacular goodies that new computers offer, it is a shame that seem still to operate as Dos speeds. |