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can anyone reccomend me a good free firewall to use with xp?



cheers dan

OH TOLEEDY!

xp comes with a free firewall or did you mean a hardware firewall separate from your computer? try shorewall or ipcop

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"That's the trouble with political jokes in this country... they get elected!" -- Dave Lippman

Microsoft are now doing the "one care beta version". Its a free download, but it requires that you uninstall other antivirus software. Its not bad for a freebie.

Im a norton man myself

bleh. norton is evil. even moreso than microsoft hard to believe as that is...

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"That's the trouble with political jokes in this country... they get elected!" -- Dave Lippman

I agree that norton is evil... I don't think that I'd be willing to go as far as sayin' that it's more evil than microsoft..

Personally, I think that using MS's standard firewall (even tho it's junk), watching where you go on the net and what you download, setting your browser to not allow cookies w/out your permission, using proxies, and reformatting occasionally works good against viruses, hackers, spyware/adware, etc

That's just my opinion and it's all based on my experiences, but whatever

I use Zone Alarm, microshaft's firewall, and real time antivirus monitoring. Zonealarm is nice, as anytime anything wants to access the internet, it notifies you and you can allow or deny it. It's quite noisy at first, asking you all sorts of stuff, but if it's something you know is routine, you can set it to access the net without asking. If you want to change it, you can set the access priveleges manually.
Zone Alarm

Norton does that too, all you have to do is set it to "learn" mode.

Its really not that evil, its annoying on update size , and it can be a bit paranoid for home networks, but the point is at least it does get updates. Ive never had other antivirus and firewall packages pick up as much junk as norton does , but then it can slow the pc a bit occasionally. The new one is faster than the old one though. I would like to slag it off, but the fact is that ive been using norton for 4 years and never been hit by a virus in that time, or needed a reformat or rebuild.

If it ever does get paranoid about a certain piece of software it kinda reminds me that im about to put some crap on my machine.Which is a good thing really. Loads of freebie software comes with spyware and viruses and frankly I dont really need it. I'll use norton until something better comes along, and since I work for IBM and get the software testing reports,and have seen the amount of hidden nasties in other packages ill stick with norton for now. I dont love it,its big, ponderous, sometimes slow, the udate tools arent always reliable, and it gets militant about certain pieces of software, but then I have a powerful pc, and work in IT for a living. Its not gutting to me, and the protection is significant. I wish there was something better too, at least something more compact, and perhaps better designed with other software vendors in mind.It seems to provide better protection than mcafee, given all the problems ive had with zurichs motor engineers laptops weve had over the years. But then theres a lot of software out there with stuff in it that there shouldnt be....

Lesser of two weevils

its really not that evil, its annoying on update size

oooh - and dont forget when Norton AV finds a virus, crashes and takes Windows with it!!!

And not just taking Windows as in having to restart, destroying system files so much that a reinstall is needed

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I like to think that whoever designed marine life was thinking of it as basically an entertainment medium. That would explain some of the things down there, some of the unearthly biological contraptions

Oddly enough mines never done that since having a firewall, despite being on the net daily.I reckon OS instability and lack of a firewall might be a factor in that particular issue.It happened when I used to have 98, and ME,and no firewall (oh those heady days!lol) but not with XP, and certainly not with the internet security package.You get options of quarantines and deletes anyway if you use the advanced options.

Just having an antivirus isnt good enough anymore.Its better you dont pick up infections to start with. Besides if things really do go ape, xp has recovery and norton does Ghost.Problem starts when XP stops creating recovery points occasionally. Most annoying.

norton is evil because

- it will screw up your email settings out of the blue and require you to redo all of it
- they are known to use rootkit technology to hide portions of their software engine
- it basically takes over your whole system and depending on what version you get can be *incredibly* difficult to remove, sometimes requiring editing the registry

that's just a start off the top of my head. they used to be a good company but the last 7-8 years i've just been more and more annoyed with their software and their decisions.

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"That's the trouble with political jokes in this country... they get elected!" -- Dave Lippman