Windows Firewall, Is It Any Good?

Hey sup? In 2 days I’ll have an internet connection at home again after a 2 year hiatus & was wondering if the standard windows XP professional firewall is any good at stopping hackers from browsing through my shit.

In the past I used the free zonealarm thingy, but since windows comes equipped with it’s own firewall, do I need to install another one?

grtz

Richard

Hey :)

The Windows-Firewall is — okay for usual needs. Most important is not to go online with an admin-account. I do not know which sort of connection you use but with a DSL-Router, which supports NAT, you’re on the safer side :)

just my 2cents.

i use zonealarm

but then again, i have windows 2k :)

thumbs up for zonelabs zonealarm! :yeah:

You might want to try keerio.

I also use zonealarm. It’s good.

windows firewall is ok. without bells and whistles and correctly configured sure does its job well.

kerio is ok, blackice is good

oh never heard of blackice…I`ll try it.

blackice is nice because it’s a lot more transparent than zonealarm. zonealarm is like INSANELY over-protective of your system… if any program tries to access the internet, it automatically blocks it at first and you have to set permissions for EVERY program you run … it’s ridiculous. blackice (i think it’s called network ice now) pretty much just blocks incoming ports, it doesn’t care what on your computer accesses the outside.

i agree with bantai about having a good hardware firewall is better though :)

ah I c…its the bitdefender...hm...got a lot customers who are having severe problems regarding to that, but now Ill at least test it…and no - zonealarm doesn´t block everything - configuring is easy, but it spys and transmits data without permission.

okay so far so well, but the AAPS of black ice is a lot improvable. I`ll turn it off, it scan every setup you make for at least 5 minutes the files…brrr…

oh some bad news about black ice and other iss products:

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/71301

So at least I´ve to try out some more.

Sygate Personal Firewall is another good one.

i use to be pretty well interested in security, before i started using renoise.
my lan consists of a few clients, so i have everything behind a 400mhz dell i turned into a diy linux firewall/router, behind that is a linksys w54g. its not a 100% invulnerable, but its enough to not have me thinking someone is logging into my system.
on this pc i write from i have no firewall software at all, in fact the only outgoing firewall i have on this lan is in my ibook. i look at my F/R as a great wall of china, protecting my stupid windows computers.

Get a router, seriously. Don’t use software that bogs down the machine. I haven’t seen a single firewall program that doesn’t decrease the computer’s performance.

The worst software out there is NORTON. From poor system performance to rootkits, Norton software sucks.

Yes, Norton software is very very slow and huge. I don’t prefer this also.

I’m sorry to say this but all personal firewalls for windows sucks. I use Kerio myself, and it is not because it’s very good, its just because it is the firewall that let you conroll the most yourself, and I do not like automatic crap ;)

Most software-firewalls use very little of the preformance from your computer.
I have a 100MBit connection and most of the routers on the market do not manage to let you surf in full speed with such a connection. The once that let you do so is often more expencive that to buy a pretty cheep computer and install a linux-firewall on it and use that one as a router…
So if you should use a router, it is often better to use an old computer as a router than to buy a dedicated one…
And even if you use a router it is always good to use a peronal firewall becuse a router can just block ports and in/outgoing traffic, it can not block traffic from a sepcific program…

100% true. and windows more than other OS.