Free Windows firewalls found better than commercial ones

[nudone]

just thought i'd mention my futher adventures of my system being messed up by comodo.

i previously said that i couldn't reinstall zone alarm (free edition) after having comodo on my machine. this probably had nothing to do with comodo and was just because zone alarm didn't uninstall correctly.

i've now got zone alarm back on the machine and thought it worth mentioning the little util that let me do it.

Greenwood's Computer Corner http://www.greenwood....com/sgcomputer.html has a download called zfix.zip that, when run, will remove all traces of zone alarm.

of course, you can do it manually and start messing around looking for files to delete and things to remove out of the registry - but 'zfix' does it all for you.

seems to be a common problem with zone alarm.

[Carol Haynes]

Have you tried removing ZoneAlarm properly and then installed Comodo? It could be that a bad uninstall caused the problems as Firewalls often don't play nicely together.

[mitzevo]

I have been using Comodo Firewall for about 5 days now and it hasn't given me any problems. I guess nudone that it's one of those problems that happen to people because of there setup - installed things, maybe hardware, previous installed things, etc.

It's quite annoying to be 'a (bad) statistic' when trying software/anything when you hear so much good stuff about it.

From what I can say of trying Comodo Firewall the last 5 days is that

it's very light on system resources - the interface/program it self is very fast (which doesn't look like it at all since it looks like it uses a heavy skin)

it's defiantly not for newbies - this is for sure.

it's really different from Outpost (which I like) - Comodo Firewall, is just a firewall - it does not have any plug-ins, so some one using Outpost may not like this if considering moving over to Comodo (or at least trying it), that is of course if you like the plug-ins at all and use them.

Any way I haven't really played with Comodo as much as I should before considering using it from now on. Guess I should do that very soon.

[nudone]

i admit that i only unistalled zone alarm in the usual manner before installing comodo. this clearly didn't remove all the files it should have done otherwise i wouldn't have had a problem when reinstalling zone alarm. so, i can accept this might be why the comodo firewall acted a bit odd with me.

i'd give comodo another try but i found the number of prompts it kept popping up was far too annoying - stupid things like maxthon is trying to connect to the internet using parent application gom player. almost anything that connected to the net would say it was using a different parent application to do so - i'm sure some things were correct but others were gibberish - and if they weren't gibberish then i really don't want to know. no doubt this is makes for a more secure system but i haven't the patience to click a prompt pretty much every time something connects - i'm more used to allowing a program through the firewall and then letting that be remembered for me.

okay, it would only ask once for each specific combination of app and parent app but the number of parent apps it 'thought' were being used just made it ridiculous. i shan't try to describe the situation further as i can well imagine i'm the only person that had this problem.

anyway, my main reason for using comodo was for assigning specific port numbers - which i quickly realised after installing it that i really don't need to use (port numbers were important to me about 3 years ago).

currently, zone alarm allows me to allow an app through the firewall - and then forget about it. i really don't care what 'parent' application is being used to trigger it.

is my system an less safe because of it? i'm not worried, i'm just glad not to have to keep clicking on extra dumb prompts.

this isn't to say that wouldn't try comodo again - i'll just wait until i have a good reason for it.

[bobdec]

I have been running comando for abour 3 months now and really like it.

It does a good job Blocking attacks from outside. Controls which programs can access the Internet or network. Recognizes known safe programs. Blocks malware-style leak tests. Resists termination by malware-style techniques.

Initial bombardment of program-control confirmation pop-ups can be annoying—as with most firewalls. But that gets better as you use it.

[broken85]

I wish I could find a decent lightweight (read: non-system-or-network-affecting) firewall whose sole purpose was to block malicious outbound connections. I have no need for software filtering of in-bound data since my router does that without any overhead, but I wouldn't mind being able to enable outbound protection in a really lightweight client when working on my PC, as a safeguard against, for instance, making a bad software installation decision and having unauthorized sensitive data get sent out, which my router of course would care less about.

Has anyone heard of or used something like this? Maybe there's a really lightweight firewall that I can just disable inbound filtering on, but I've never used one that I've found to be suited for such a purpose.