Which Firewall Is Better...?

Hi There, I'm Having a Problem Selecting Better Firewall For WindowsXP SP2. Here's My Specs 1st....

AMD Athlon64 X2 3600+
Asus M2NPV-MX With nVidia 6150 Chipset + 430
512 DDR2 RAM

There's Firewall Support Comes With 6150 nVidia Chipset, Named "nVidia Active Armor Firewall" As Many People Allready Know About It. My Quation Is Should I Stick With This One OR I Must Use The Industial Standard - ZoneAlarm..., OR We Have Better Option............Please Help!

 

check out http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads34.html

there you will find various firewalls some free i use SYGATE PRO and find it excellent but SYGATE HOME (free version) is also very good
http://img527.imageshack.us/img527/2466/is5ze8.jpg
Shot at 2007-08-14

 

I've been using Comodo Personal Firewall for about as long as it's been out, I'm very happy with it and it passes all leak tests

 

I'm testing Comodo on one of my PCs and seems to be working ok. But I put it on another one and it hosed the machine until I removed it. :cry Not sure what the issues were. So until I can further test Comodo, I'm using ZoneAlarm or Sygate. rolleyes

 

Thank You All For Your Suggestions Here, Nice To Listen To Your Experience As Well. But My Question Is a Bit Diffrent Here, I Need To Select From Two of The Firewalls That I Already Have....."ZoneAlarm" & "nVidia Active Armor". Sorry If've Not Made My Self Clear Already.

 

No One To Answer On This One.....

 

of the two i have only tried ZoneAlarm but had problems with it. i can recomend comodo to you as others have said above...

 

Comodo

Just my personal opinion. Works great on my system.

 

From what I can remember the nVidia firewall had too many bugs and issues in the past. Not sure about the newest/latest version. :confused

In this case I would use ZoneAlarm. It may be a bit of a resource hog as some say, but I currently do not have any problems with it. And I use ZoneAlarm on a 7 year old IBM ThinkPad with a Pentium III 846 MHz processor and 512MB of PC100 RAM. Very old, but my OS (XP Pro), all other software, and hardware are tweaked to the max and runs with the best of them.

I have the Comodo firewall on an old Dell Desktop and it seems to be running okay. But when I tried putting Comodo on another one of my IBM ThinkPads it hosed it. It ran like crap. It took Comodo off and put on ZoneAlarm and it runs super smooth. Not sure why Comodo didn't want to work with the IBM, but I'm going to test it again soon. (

 

I have found the nVidia firewall useless on my daughter's rig. It's a second thought from the makers and is bundled with the chipset and network card drivers.

If you have to choose between the two than go with ZA. I would use Comodo as the others have sugested.

 

I had ZoneSS,and dyring this time I couldn't accept the fact that Zone use from 70-90 MB of my ram,so I uninstall Zone and now I use Comodo with only 15megs of my ram.Judging by the ram you have Comodo is my favorite.Plus it's free.
BTW,I have 1GB ram.
AND for the end Comodo beat every other firewall in the leak test.

 

7mm,
You're probably getting tired of hearing about Comodo by now ,but I've also used the free version since it came out and I'm also happy with it.
But I'm giving you something the others didn't; a link to the firewall leak test results:
http://www.matousec.com/projects/windows-personal-firewall-analysis/leak-tests-results.php

They not only show how good Comodo is, but how poorly ZA performs in comparison.

BTW...you didn't mention which version of Zone Alarm you have. If you only have the free version installed, there wouldn't be any farm in uninstalling it temporarily to try Comodo...

 

https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2


There is also this one.

 

A lot of the processing is handled by the onboard nic, which is good. The Nvidia firewall, bugs aside, is very powerful, and has a quite a few features and settings that you won't find in a lot of these software solutions.

 

Yes, I have to agree! I'm running this at home, and love it (on Win XP Professional x64). Seems to be the easiest to configure, and it detects traffic other firewalls I've tried don't (though, it's only been Sygate and Zone Alarm on this rig, so that may not be saying much) Not sure what version I'm running, but will post later, if I remember.

Never encountered any "bugs", myself. As an aside, can anyone tell me what I should be looking for?

 

I'm reading about a lot of people having troubles with:

1. P2P - I had no problems getting it to work with Azureus, if that counts. This ~*sounds*~ like it could be user error, not configuring rules correctly. (Last I used a "proper" P2P client, it needed to be able to make AND accept connections, which I know some users have trouble setting up, but that's no different from Azureus)

2. Hardware offloading (as Adryn mentioned the NIC does a lot of processing) - sounds like XP doesn't handle that well(?) resulting in system instability. Not sure of the validity of this, but I haven't had an issue. Then again, I'm using Win XP x64, which I think is just a rehashed version of Server 2K3.

As an edit to the above - IIRC, I may not have had Sygate running on this rig - think it made her crash!

@7mm - it may help to know what version of XP you're using 32 or 64 bit

 

I am probally gonna get flamed for this, but firewalls are a good idea but really tend to give people a false sense of security. When a program ask for permision to access the net, most will just push yea, with out the faintest idea what is wanting access to the net.

I have cleaned countless computers with users of thoes pcs in total shock of all the stuff I find. They have that false sense of security. Firewalls are pretty much the same. Its the user of the pc itself is the best or worst security issue.

 

I've been using free version Comodo for a couple of years and am quite happy with it.

 

I recently tried out Comodo, and just plunged in without research. I had a heck of a time figuring out how to set up rules correctly, and ended up denying traffic I wanted, and couldn't figure out how to allow it. It was a fresh build, so I just gave up and formatted.

To avoid these kinds of troubles, I strongly recommend that you research ANY firewall you choose to employ. To that end, I'm linking the Comodo Firewall User's Manual, something I should have had with me before trying it out.

 

i just ran the test and got 100% stealth "there are no indications that a computer exists"

i am running Sygate Prohttp://bestsmileys.com/fireworks/7.gif

 

Same here with ZoneAlarm Free rolleyes

 

Bug likes Comodo too, as for the two choices, take Zone Alarm over nVidia, go with the devil you know I guess. For a commercial all-in-one I use PC-cillin from Trend Micro on Windows systems. One license covers three computers, and other security software companies are following suit. It helps to have a system you can try things out on that isn't mission critical. Best to use soft and hard ware to protect your system from dirt bags.
Bug

 

Stealth is undoubtedly a false sense of security. In a sense, it stops the script kiddies and thats it.

Any experienced hacker can get through it, even inexperienced ones innocent) have a decent chance of success using a scanner like nmap.

I'll not diverge any further, aside from saying that stealth has little to no bearing on ICMP packets.

Don't think that you are completely safe behind a stealth reading.

Practice safe computing, learn about network security, get yourself a hardware firewall w/ IDS and SPI, and use what software firewall application that works for you.

This alone will protect you more than relying on some stupid network scanner giving a stealth reading.

Your biggest threat to security are viruses and malware anyway (in which stealth is irrelevant), and once your machine is compromised, I wouldn't put faith in any software firewall solution.

 

A firewall alone is useless at this point 7mm. Another Comodo product that I would recomend is here.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/Comodo_BOClean_Anti-Malware_d5616.html

 

ADRYN i understand what you are saying and do not rely on my firewall to keep me safe, i am a novice in computing and get a bit paranoid have been infected on 2 occasions, i have a number of checking/cleaning programs i can call on for help but the best form of defence is ME not opening things i don't trust or understand

http://bestsmileys.com/computer1/13.gif

 

Dang, just when I was beginning to get happy, someone had to come along and remind me.

 

Well I tried using Comodo again on one of by IBMs. Looked like it was going okay. Still not happy with it. But it does use less RAM than Zone Alarm

512MB RAM for system

1. Comodo
57% Load
218 MB Free

2. ZoneAlarm Free
59% Load
206 MB Free

3. Windows XP Firewall Only
54% Load
234 MB Free


For some reason even though Comodo uses less RAM approximately 12MB:cool, I'm still having issues with it slowing down my multi-tasking. Especially if I try to open an IE7 window and Firefox window at the same time. It even crashed on me when I first try to open them during the same session. cry