Firewalls - please, i can't be bothered.

[nudone]

well, i have obviously lost my mind. i stated above that i hadn't tried the sygate firewall so i'd give it a go when i had chance.

i've just installed and quickly uninstalled it. i had tried it before and commented that it doesn't appear to work on my system - it doesn't bother to inform me about applications trying to make a connection. instead it just blocks them. pretty useless - on my machine, at least.

so, i'm sticking with the devil i know, which is the free edition of zone alarm.

[richiesan]

Apologies - didn't realise that Sygate was a synonym for Symantec.

[Grorgy]

I was about to give up on firewalls to, but in the end i went with Kaspersky internet suite which includes their antivirus.  I got it mainly for the antivirus but it was an option, for a bit more money, of course, to get the whole thing so i did.  Seems to work ok for me and i got so sick and tired of hunting for free stuff that didnt work the way i wanted, i want no interference mostly, but the options are there to do what you want.  It has a 30 day free trial.

[Darwin]

Hi all - I disabled ZoneAlarm Pro (latest build) a couple of days ago as I'm behind a hardware firewall and I *intend* to run ZA when I'm on other networks. I got sick and tired of weight of the thing... I have documented elsewhere the fact that I am experiencing 12 minute boots under XP Pro and general system slowdown. Disabling ZA and Winpatrol Plus (amongst others - RecentX, SnagIt, Mophy Accent) from running from the tray has liberated close to 200 MB of RAM and massively decreased the "hit" on my CPU. It's also cut startup times in half. They're still too long but a work in progress. As my harddrive is getting quite full, and I've already gotten rid of some big files, I've sprung for a larger 7200 rpm notebook drive. I'm curious to see if it will make much difference to the performance of my machine. Probably most noticeable difference will be reduced battery life and a dent in my bank account, but you know what they say about fools and money...

[tomos]

Apologies - didn't realise that Sygate was a synonym for Symantec.

-richiesan (March 19, 2007, 11:35 AM)

dont believe it is - I think that post of nudones wasn't referring to yours

[nudone]

Apologies - didn't realise that Sygate was a synonym for Symantec.

-richiesan (March 19, 2007, 11:35 AM)

dont believe it is - I think that post of nudones wasn't referring to yours

-tomos (May 06, 2007, 10:17 AM)

tomos is correct. i had simply forgotten which firewalls were which and what i had already tried before.

perhaps something that no one has tried is this...

i'm now using the firewall that is built into NetLimiter 2 Pro http://www.netlimiter.com/

no complaints so far. it pretty much does what you'd expect, i.e. prompts you if something can access the net or not.

(i didn't put zone alarm back on because it wouldn't let me. i would have put the free version of outpost v1 on instead but that won't install either. until i completely reinstall everything on this machine i'm content with how things are.)

[biox]

Kerio-now-Sunbelt is just $10 at the moment. I've been using it for a while (with my luck, pre-discount of course) and it seems to do a great job. Application control-yes but back tracing-no. Didn't even let me upload my avatar w/o being told to allow it.
http://www.sunbelt-software.com/