I just purchased a new laptop with Vista Home Premium. So far, all of my third party software works great with it. My problem is with the firewall on Vista. It turns itself off after the machine is rebooted. I've checked all the settings associated with the firewall but nothing stops it from turning itself off. On reboot I get the little red security icon in the sys tray telling me the firewall is off. I'm not running any other firewall program. Anyone experiencing this or have a suggestion? Thanks in advance.
you [bold]don't[/bold] want to run vista's firewall, anyway. it's an inferior piece of software and the machine is doing you a favor. you need to install a firewall that's actually worthwhile.
Thanks for the info. Are there any 'free' firewalls that work better than others in Vista? How is ZoneAlarm with Vista? Thanks again.
...... actually Vista firewall is extremely better than the useless XP one was. Here is some info on it, not sure if your problem is found here: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,128009-page,7/article.html
after you run through services to make sure the firewall is set to automatic instead of manual, run msconfig and check the sevices tab there also. After that, make sure the profile settings under windows firewall advanced settings all match. Then, turn off the security center alert option.
Thanks for both of your responses. bbthumper, the pcworld article has useful info. Altometrn, I looked at the firewall settings and everything looked OK. I then ran msconfig and everything looked fine until I checked the startup menu. There was an unknown program running. I could not read the program name because it was in Chinese. I disabled it and performed a reboot. Windows firewall stayed on after reboot. So I'm assuming this may be spyware or worse. Since this is a new machine, I am going to do a fresh install, after I have backed up what lttle data I have on it. Thanks again for both of your responses.
