can anyone recommend a firewall for home use? I use the one in win XP pro but i gather this is very basic. or do you think its ok for home use??

 

cheerz :)

No experience of the one in XP Pro personally, so I don't really know what it's features are..

 

When I run Windows, I run ZoneAlarm (http://www.zonealarm.com) - free, does the job, and a piece of cake to set up..

 

When I get broadband I'll set up a SmoothWall box (http://www.smoothwall.org), which is a dedicated firewall PC - but you don't need that.. I'm just rambling now.. I'll get me coat..

The windows firewall is very basic, zonealarm is basic and smoothwall is very good! I use smoothwall to protect the PC's at work. It uses a specially customised cut down version of the linux operating system - very secure and gets patches etc if any bugs/flaws are found. Its has the record of never being breached which not many firewalls can claim. Only problem is you need a dedicated PC - you can use any old pc, late 486 + and about 24+ mb of ram.

 

If you are an occasional modem user then the windows/zone alarm stuff will do but if you have broadband/static IP address then you should get a decent firewall... as these are the type that get targeted more...

 

Hope this helps - I dont know how "techie" you are so tried to keep it simple ;)

 

Barry

The XP firewall is functional but not impressive, I won't bore you with the details. My feeling is that it will roll along for a while and then Micro$haft will buy one of the competition (company and all like they have in the past) and include it in the product at a later date.

 

I have only used one other product on an MS platform and it's ZoneAlarm. The free version is great, the Pro version is better but costs you $49 for 2 years use.

I concur with these suggestions - ZoneAlarm has good reviews and the inbuilt one in XP is as good as you'd expect from those b*stards in Seattle. Not very.

 

As an alternative, I use Norton everything - so it does firewall, antivirus, security and other stuff. Seems to keep itself updated OK and - touch wood - my mini network is OK so far. (Used to use McAfee, then went to Norton/Symantec, had lousy tech support so went back to McAfee, found their tech support and product had got way worse so went back to Norton.....)

OK Zone alarm is free but Zonealarm cost money.

 

However as always there is a hack :D...

 

Go to download.com and download zonealarm pro. You will get a 30 days trial version. After the 30 days is up, do not choose to buy the software, instead you need to redownload it from download.com. When it tells you you already have zonealarm pro on your PC and asks you whether you want to remove the old version and re-install or upgrade, choose upgrade. This is then give you the full version of Zone alarm Pro without asking you for a security code. However you MUST go into the settings and uncheck the box which says automatically search for updates.

 

Hope this helps