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Due to Norton's Internet Security's memory hogging I am thinking of switching antivirus and firewall programs. ZoneAlarm seems like the logical choice for firewall. If anyone disagrees feel free to let me know why.

What about antivirus? I've noticed references to F-Secure and Kapersky in several discussions here? Do they really differ greatly? Any preferences?

I use ZoneAlarm at home and I love it...takes a little while to get it acting the way you want, but after 2 or 3 days, I had it dialed in nicely. Not too familiar with F-Secure or Kapersky...hope this helps a little bit.

Read my post here
http://www.techspot.com/vb/showthrea...&threadid=9646

zonealarm is very good. i use zonealarm pro and it has been good to me so far. zonealarm takes a while at first to get things the way i wanted it to be because it controls outbound program access. my only real gripe is that the ad-blocker sometimes blocks things that are not ads if you set it to high.

i have heard some good things about agnitum outpost pro. i have not used it so i cannot say anything about it myself.

i run a software firewall with a hardware router and hopefully it will shield me from any nasty things. there are some threads in the forum of how you can use an old computer and run a simple-to-use linux firewall for free. well that is if you want a good hardware firewall for pretty cheap.

i currently use mcafee for anti-virus since i got a free subscription for about a year. mcafee is pretty good. most people will agree that it is better than norton for antivirus IMHO (product activation...damn you norton). the problem that i have with mcafee is that there is heavy disk activity if it tries to read a very large compressed file (like several hundred megabytes or higher). it really slows my computer down greatly! there are probably some better anti-virus programs out there however.

Smoothwall Express is a small Linux distro specifically for the purpose, it runs on most old hardware, has low system requirements, is easy to set up and best of all is free. Plus everyone has a spare machine kicking around