ZA is a nice start: clean, simple, gives the basic protection and is updated regularly (well, the Pro version was pretty neat, I never tried the free version). BLackICE i only used once before -- didnt like it much (nothing in particular). Tiny's Personal Firewall: it's nice, but I absolutely hate the interface and its tedium. Agnitium Outpost (Pro): my fav
For a home user Zone Alarm is probably the easist to use and configure. I haven't looked at Black Ice in a couple years, but it used to not check outgoing packets or have any program control about which programs could access the internet. I think that has been fixed in later versions but that used to be a big issue with BI. You could get a trojan on your local pc and it would not be blocked at all from accessing the internet with the version of BI that I tried years ago, where with ZA the program control would alert you that it was trying to access the network. Tiny is good but uses rulesets more like commercial products like Checkpoint. It is a lot harder to configure without some knowledge of networking. I have heard good things about Norton Firewall too, but haven't ever used it. I will have to check out Agnitium Outpost since Praetor has given it the thumbs up. The screenshots on http://www.agnitum.com/products/outpost/ look good.
It's cute, clean and really easy to fire up a shitload of new rules on the fly. THat's was my big peeve with Tiny (aside from the crappy interface), was the fact that to make the rules you had to manually do each and every single thing (i.e., type it out -- and that can be tedious as a mofo), With Agnitium, you can right-click and within a couple clicks, create a new rule for somthing Geez do i ever feel on the spotlight Cheers. I must admit though, when i switched over to Agnitium from ZA Pro I was kinda shocked to notice the "fancy system tray icon" from ZA was replaced with.... a question mark (the question mark indicates "Rules Mode" which is default). With regards to Norton's submissions, I think it didnt do so well on reviews because it (a) has the incessently annoying popup thingy-ma-jiggy (I havnt used Norton's Firewalls since Norton Personal Firewall 2001 and that was a VERY short experience for me, on the order of as few minutes, so all this is heresay hehe). Furthereore, it seems that ZA still does a better job as far as interface and protection go. (althought it might have been ZA Pro). That's the nice thing about ZA, they have a free firewall _X_X_X_X_X_[small]ASUS A7V8X-X, AMD2500+ Samsung 1024MB, PC2700 360GB [3x120GB, 7200, 8MB] MSI Starforce, GeForce4 Ti4400 128MB Rules and Policies: http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/2487 AFTERDAWN IRC: irc.emule-project.net, #ad_buddies COME SAY HI![/small]
so let's say for a computard like me......ZA or agnitium 1.0.......i was checking out the comparison of 2.0 (pro) and 1.0 and this is wut i understood....blah blah blah blah and of course hippityhoopla....so with that said...ZA or 1.0....thx
i installed the ZA and it i like it so far, but the constant asking "do you wish to allow this program access to the internet?" is weighin on my nerves, but that's the price for some level of security...just yesterday after i installed it i got a red alert, it was exciting, i sweateded even....anyway, oh yeah, check this out, now that i am runnin the ZA, i have to log-in every time i post....i used to log-in before viewing any threads so that if i were to answer, every1 could see my beautiful sig...now i have to log-in during every reply....grrrrrr....am i correct in assuming it has to do with the cookie level setting in ZA?......thanx for all the help guys
When you have a firewall you gotta spend tim e and configure it dude. Of course you can always use presets and stuff but (1) ZA doenst have presets and (2) presets really restrict you
TKO, open ZA, go to alerts & logs/log viewer and select the off position. This will keep some of those pesky messages to a minimum. Also, go to programs/program control and block or allow access (get rid of the ? mark). That way ZA will not ask.
