I've used alot of firewalls & various antivirus sw. i'd say for a home (personal) use firewall that compared to Black Ice, Symantec's Norton, sygate, outpost and kerio that zone alarm has all the protection and pis robably the easiest to use, although outpost is right there with it. Also tried Computer Associates E-Trust EZ Firewall and it was also good but then I found out it's based on the code used in Zone Labs' Zone Alarm so you pay more for the same features. I really like kerio but it's more the power user (doesn't give you all the "browse" features and since I write scripts, etc that doesn't way alot with me). Outpost is just like using Outlook guiand it also has alot of content blocker plug-ins that you can download from their site for no charge. i heard that some of the personal firewalls out there report info to their sites so be careful and use a well-tested product from a reputable company. Personally I'd pick a firewall separate from my antivirus software. Still don't know anyone who keeps up with Symantec (Norton) as far as viruses go & that is somewhere that I wouldn't want to go sub-standard... i run two antivirus programs along with various anti-spyware packages. As far as firewalls, if you're the average PC user, then Zone Alarm Pro gives you easy pop-ups that auto-configure the firewall to not permit certain programs to access it (none should have server rights on a home PC). have zone alarm running on one of the small business servers I support along with Norton Antivirus and it works great.. i even let the business owner configure it 'cause it's so easy. I also have a the free zone alarm version running at two of my friends houses (one is Win2000 and teh other PC is XP home OSes) & they find it very easy to configure the auto notification features etc. In fact you can get it free if you just want to use the firewall feature. On the small bus server, we run alot of different applications and I haven't had seen any problems with the firewall not recognizing the software that is trying to access the internet (very simple interface and much easier to configure than Symantec Internet Security (have that at home on two of my pcs 'cause I got it for small price when upgrading my tools, but now I regret loading IS and wish I'd gone with Zone Alarm and just left the Norton AV and Norton Tools alone). I'm working to back it out without to re-install windows (zone alarm, sygate and outpost completely uninstall clean by the way). Look at some of the pcworld reviews where they've tested a bunch of them & you'll see it's the top 2. quote: "Opinions are like Aholes. Everyone has one and most of them stink." hopes this helps in your decision.
