Received wisdom here in the UK is not to rely on Windows Firewall 'cos hackers learn how to circumvent this in infant school.

I've been well-served by Zone Alarm's free version for some years now, but I have a problem configuring this to allow my other home workgroup PC to access the internet. This it appears can only be done by reducing internet security to Medium. I tried upgrading to ZA Pro and couldn't find out how to configure this either, other than with only Medium protection.

So at present I can either rely solely on Windows Firewall, which configures itself fine but query how effective, or run ZA on Medium.

Which is likely to be safer?

Stick with Zonealarm, the Windows firewall is rubbish.

Normally you would have Zonealarm configured as High for the internet zone security and medium for the trusted zone.

However, if this still causes you problems, you might want to try the free Kerio firewall. (http://www.sunbelt-software.com/Kerio.cfm)

Regards Howard :)

I personally like Comodo (http://personalfirewall.comodo.com/)

see this post for comments (http://www.techspot.com/vb/showthread.php?p=341472#post341472)

A lot of routers comes with SPI and Intrustion detection along with NAT. I've tried all the free firewalls, those you pay for also :) I still find not one really works as good as they claim. My favorite was Armor2Net, but that has some bugs.

You can make it that no one gets into your network at home, but there are trade off doing that. There are some free firewalls that do a pretty good job blocking IPs, ads, spyware an etc..

ZA does not work for me I'm a firewall pain inna ****
just tried out comodo worked for a few weeks, on last boot would not run
and it seemed to be a good FW
went back to outpost the newest version running like a charm.


thats my story and I'm stick'n to it