I currently use Sygate Personal Firewall, it has been good for me, it does not use alot of ram, around 8 to 10meg on my system. Also its free.

Im using Norton Personal Firewall 2004, works great for me. It has also won some awards and sh*t..

if ya want some crazy downloading ... any firewall sucks ...
if ou do just "normal" things ...Sygate Personal Firewall is a very good and free choice ...
if ya want it as easy as possible ... install SP2 and use the new SP2 firewall which is very good!

Zonealarm is a good Firewall and it's Free.

Windows Xp has a Firewall built in you could use that one.

Windows XP SP2 will have some type of new firewall?Not sure what it will do.

sp2's fw rlz :)

So all or most of you already have SP2 downloaded? I kept away with it until official release. Do you think I should get it?

Ok as a quick question guys, ZoneAlarmPro or Sygate. Which has been proven to be better? Thx :)

Why would SP2 rule when its not even out yet?

And the one u got is just a beta test. :finger:

Y do so many people jump the gun and install Beta Stuff and says it rules.
It wont rule till it's out,and when it's comes out!!!there is bound to be a patch for it.

Here is another vote for Sygate Firewall.

Top rate stuff.

USE A ROUTER!!!

agreed to Felixml

Router

löl whats the difference between beta and final ? not much and between RC and final ? very less so why shouldn't you install the beta ot do not give any comment about it .... its nearly final ... the last changes you won't even notice ...

but zonealarm vs sygate ...
sygate is professional with all the options you need ... all setting and maximum flexibility ...
zonealarm is for noobs .. a VERY VERY bloated user interface ... 100ts of uselesss help screens .... ugly colors and a not really working engine ... it did not even pass the easy webtests ... when I tried zonealarm I was really disappointed

Honestly the best firewall to have is a router or a linux gateway. Winblows exploits make any firewall useless under that platform. But if you really need one under windows, kerio is decent.

I use the unknown Outpost Firewall.

It has won it over Zone Alarm for me.

Every (known) leaktest gets caught by it, it's nicely expendable with plugins, clear overview which program has which ports opened.

Only downside is the 22 meg of RAM it uses, but with 1GB, I can spend it.

yeah ... there is always a better way to protect ... but only one real secure one ... UNPLUG the netweork cable

not for real ... if ya look at this .. ANY firewall is useless since all of them can be cracked .... to take a deeper look into it .... its even more then only it could be cracked ... the problem is ... ppl. behind a firewall think they are secure ... but they aren't ... you need more skills to get round the firewall but there is always away ... ... I do know that I am not well protected against a real attack ... and as soon as I see some strange happening I can react ... while the firewall user will not notice it because he is relying on the firewall ....
you got to decide if you want to use a firewall or not .... I am online 24/7/365/10 and I never had some real problem with this ... without any firewall ... and even if someone would brake into my PC ... hell steal my spammed email accounts ??? ... unless you have very very critical informations on ya PC you don't really need a firewall ... especially those sucking CPU performance ... thats why sygate is also quite good ... it uses below 1%

Any hardware firewall... that isnt cisco (due to their unfortunate breakin and liberation of their os)
my linksys firewall works excellent.

why is it that everyone starts talking about software when firewalls is mentioned? EW @ software firewalls.

because everybody see´s the great test over firewalls
ohhh, it´s sooo secure, no one can hack you, no datas can go out etc

and no one is talking bout routers
because....
they cost some cents

i just bought a router.....40€
wow, it´s sooooo expensive
but u will get not only a Hardware Firewall
no, u get a switch with in it !?!
that´s great
if u unplag router from i-net
u have a switch

and , other thing for broadcast user
u can go with 4 pc´s EASYLIE in i-net

but it costs
~40€

so, everybody is talking bout software firewall
beacause noone will spend money for security

Hi
for 'best' security you need a software firewall and a hardware one.
Hardware firewalls (ie routers) cannot protect you from a piece of software on your machine thats trying to talk from your pc.
(not all software ones do well at this either!)
A badly configured software firewall will leave you in a similar position.

Thats not to say you should install both, its personal choice.
No matter what firewall you use, you need to be aware of what it can do and how.
A hardware firewall is very low maintenance and will more or less give you top protection straight out of the box.
A software firewall can do more than a hardware one and has more to understand and configure correctly.

As has been previously pointed out, any home firewall may not prevent a determined and knowledgable hacker from getting in. To this end its good, amongst other tools, to have a tool to monitor the amount of data leaving/entering your pc.
I use DUMeter.
Its saved me a few times, in fact just 2 weeks ago was the last time.
I noticed immediately after booting that my pc downloaded at max speed for about 1.5mins. I checked the whole time if any app was active and found none.
I re-installed Windows and used KAV antivirus (cheers Mertsch). During a scan of the original windows folders, it found a backdoor trojan!

Find some nice tools that cure your curiosity about what is really happening.

The best firewall I have ever used is Smoothwall. This is FREE!, linux based but completely stripped down to the bare necessities for a firewall.
Now a lot of you are groaning "oh pants its linux" but its so damn easy to install. You dont need to know a thing about linux

All you need is a Pentium 133 or higher (yup, a free pc from the scrappy), 8MB ram with 2 network cards (or a supported USB modem and 1 network card) and a 1GB hard drive (not even that!) and CD drive.
Plug yer ADSL etc router in one input (LAN or USB) and yer LAN to the other network port.
Download the smoothwall ISO and blow it to a CD.
Boot the machine off the CD, answer a couple of questions about your hardware, network setup, ISP login stuff and some basic firewall info and boom your up and running in probably less than 15 minutes!

The Firewall is configured using a web interface and its so darned good and easy to use too. It has everything you ever wanted from a hardware firewall (this is like having a top notch hardware firewall).
Patching is just as easy as a normal router. Download, tell router to upload patch. job done.

Get yer Smoothwall here
http://www.smoothwall.org/

Cheers for the asking about this, you've reminded me to get Smoothwall going again here!

USE A ROUTER!!!

Using a router is a good start (I use the SOHOware Broadguard NBG800) but it does NOT prevent applications or virus/trojans from making a socket connection or prevent them from "phoning home". A router with a built-in hardware firewall ONLY prevents hackers from breaking into your system. It does nothing at all to stop or prevent outbound traffic, unless you block specific ports and protocols to ALL traffic. There is no application specific control using a router's hardware firewall, however.

I don't think there's a huge difference between any of the software firewall programs out there but what's important is to find one you can "teach" which applications you want to allow access to the Internet and (more importantly) which applications you do NOT want to allow access. I haven't tried them all but of the ones I have (NIS, ZAP, Kerio, TPF, XPF, etc.), they all do pretty much the same thing.

Another useful feature for firewall software to have is the ability to allow you to declare a range of IP addresses as a "trusted zone". That way, if you have a few PCs connected to a router (I have 4) or hub, you can simply handle all of them via a common zone declaration to allow them to talk to each other via NetBUI or whatever FAST protocol you want to use.

At the moment, I'm using ZAP (Zone Alarm Pro) and find it has the right feature set for my needs. One of the features I use frequenty is it's ability to immediately block ALL internet traffic (both inbound and outbound) with a simple right-click (menu) on the taskbar icon. It's also a very fast firewall with a reasonably small memory footprint. It even has an ad-blocking facility and is highly customizable. There's a free version too, although I don't know what it is missing from the Pro version.

In the end, it all boils down to what set of features you find useful, how fast (meaning transparent while in use) it is and how little ram it consumes. From that standpoint, NIS (Norton Internet Security) is probably the worst of the lot and I avoid using ALL Symantec/Norton products. They're slow, are memory hogs and are by far the worst bargain out there (considering what you're paying for). Of course, that's just my opinion.

Whatever you use, YOU are the one who has to live with your choice. Not me.

Later.

I don't even know why people need these firewalls.

I for me have never encoutered a serious attack and if someone scans my open port, so what?

Go ahead, steal my useless info.

The best personal firewall is being alert and not saving life dependent info in the root of your C drive.

(Soft-/Hardware) Firewalls are for corporates, not for simple family homes.


Now, my point of view: The only reason I use a Firewall is to test it, Outpost is new on the market and had strong claims, I just had to give them a chance. :P

yeah ....
the problem is not the attack itself ...
the problem are the users ...
latest analysis showed that ppl. save all their informations like password on harddisk in full form ... so any hacker got easy play ... if ya keep your online PIN for onlinebanking in mind not on HDD no one could steal it ...
is just the same as ppl. write their PIN on the EC VISA or whatsoever card ... what do you expect now ?? :D