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What's the best firewall?


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What's the best firewall?  

432 members have voted

  1. 1. What's the best firewall?

    • ZoneAlarm
      54
    • Outpost
      35
    • Sygate
      53
    • Symantec
      17
    • Kerio
      26
    • Windows Firewall
      27


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  • 3 weeks later...

The best imo are ZoneAlarm SecuritySuite 5.5.062 and BitDefender Pro Plus 8.0.

ZoneAlarm SecuritySuite wins all if you want web filtering which it handles through cerberian. However Web Filtering cannot be managed on an user account basis which is important for home use with multiple users on a single machine, and it tends to forget firewall rules sometimes after a reset. And the installer should be alot simpler, though i like the tutorial feature.

BitDefender is an awesome program. Its detection and speed is extremely impressive, the GUI is imo the best ive seen in this type of software, it uses an MSI installer, and its a small footprint on the system. Its missing web filtering though, and Ive seen it suck up memory sometimes with real time scanning.

Dont waste your time with Norton.

A Hardware Firewall, or Router can really make a difference by itself!

oh, and firefox. :D

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hey there,

Well... for what it's worth, I've chosen Sygate as my final choice. For the free version, it comes with the most options, and AFAIK, it isn't all too bad on my system in terms of resource usage... 1 process and 15MB of RAM (out of 512). On my virtual PC (in VMWare with 192MB allocated), it only uses about 6MB on average.

I've tried other firewalls, such as Kerio, Outpost, and Zonealarm.

Kerio seemed good, but for some reason, it caused my explorer.exe CPU usage to sit at 12-15% constantly (as people may have read in other threads). Good GUI though.

OutPost just didn't seem to be very well laid out. I actually had to dig around to find the settings that I wanted... not really all that user-friendly.

ZoneAlarm was probably the worst of the 4 mentioned above. Memory eating (25-30MB... rivaling NPF) and just plain clunky in the GUI.

Another nice feature for me with Sygate is the ability to hide the system tray icon. It's not a deciding factor, but it's a nice one to have. I've never had Sygate crash or bugger up on me yet, so I don't really find a reason to have the system tray icon going. I can see my network activity through the windows icon well enough.

And then there's Norton... *shudders* I used to use it back in the 2003 days... it was alright (read: tolerable) compared to what else was available (which I didn't know existed back then). On my desktop machine as it was back then (256 MB of RAM), it did slow things down quite a bit... I remember when I got my laptop last year (desktop had 512), I simply shut NIS down to transfer the files since otherwise it would have taken me about 4 hours... :P As of then, however, Norton products have gone down the drain. I'm really glad I have my copy of PartitionMagic 8 before Norton bought PowerQuest.

Cheers!

EDIT: Oh... and a router is also used when I'm at home, and VPN network at my university

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Yeah... I didn't like ZA at all...

Sygate is really awesome because you can configure just about anything. It's even got extra security features that prevent malicious programs/trojans from shutting it down (it requires a password to stop the service). Another big plus is the fact that right now it's only drawing 6MB of RAM... that's really awesome in my eyes for a firewall that has passed every single leak I've been able to find.

The more I use it, the more I like it. I've already got 5 of my friends to start using it. They haven't noticed any slowdown at all, even on a PIII 833 with 128 MB of RAM. :thumbup

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  • 2 weeks later...

I used NIS 2004 and hadn't got a problem for over a year, and i must add that i'm connected to the web 24h ;)

The only inconvenience is that it slows the pc considerably :}

Now since i'm behind a router i use only nav2005 and sp2 firewall, and it's fast and works graet :thumbup

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  • 3 weeks later...

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