best residential use firewall?

whats the best residential use firewall? i know that there are tons out there beyond the name brand, but i wasnt sure what to get. Id probably just be looking in the under $100. My initial thought was Norton as thats what i've used in the past, but im not sure if thats still one of the best. I dont want anything to hard core, i have a firewall on my router and my ISP is nazi like with port blocking. At the same time i dont want something cheap and that will go out of date soon. I dont wanna be to picky but something that takes to long to load at startup would drive me insane. If you have any input that would be awesome :)

I dunno. I've been quite happy with Sygate's Free Personal Firewall. Even has detects changes on the system (application upgrades and such)

thnx, i did a lil research and found an article from pc mag and a few others saying norton was still on e of the best. ill definately look into sygate

Do they say Norton is the best because it offers some additional, useful functionality? Or because it has been evaluated at a higher assurance level? Or because Norton purchased the most ad space?

Those article seems little more than antecdotal. What are you looking to do with what kind of network traffic? If you are just running a basic system with client functionality and at best simple externally availible services... what advantages do you think Norton or Sygate have over your basic packet filtering router? Or the IP Filter built in to Win2k/XP?

cheers,

catch

Personaly I despise Norton. It is a very very resource hungry application, takes over your computer (if norton dont want you to do it, well then you aint gonna do it!) slows everything down and sometimes is a bitch to uninstall!

But thats just My opinion, obviuosly there willbe people who have used it for years and love it. Depends what you started out with I suppose. I find that if someone started out with norton they tend to stick to it as that is what they get used to.

I prefer Zone Alarm (not the free one). Mainly for ease of use/configuration, ease of installation, not as resource hungry as other FW's. My main critisism with however is that its AV has got to be the slowest one ever made!

You will find that everyone has their own preference of FW, the best way to find out for yourself is to install a few (not at the same time tho!) play round with them and see if you like them. Most offer a free version or a free trial.

Quote:

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Originally posted here by Nokia
Personaly I despise Norton. It is a very very resource hungry application, takes over your computer (if norton dont want you to do it, well then you aint gonna do it!) slows everything down and sometimes is a bitch to uninstall!

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I'll second that.

If this is for residential use and you already have a firewall on your router and some port blocking through your ISP, do you need anything else?

If you want to go for belt-and-braces then a free firewall would probably be the option to go for Sygate as mentioned or Zonealarm. Otherwise you'd just be wasting money unecessarily.

OK.i have test a lot of Viruses that can bypass Firewalls and Norton does nothing!!!!!if you pack a virus with a non freeware exe packer norton will not find it so you can easilly bypass firewall with some backdoor viruses!!!!only mcafee 7 finds everything!!!the new version of ZoneAlarm is Good(but slow).Kerio Firewall is Perfect(if you configure it correctly)!!!!

The most important

1:st have hardware firewall
2:nd have few antivirus on system correctly installed to avoid conflicts
3:rd some soft firewall that can notife changes and set up rulls.

"some soft firewall" = some that works good and not takes much place, like kerio, Sygate or tyni firewall.

I agree with Nokia and Aspman ditch norton, use sygate or tiny.

www.tinysoftware.com

Quote:

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Originally posted here by Nokia
Personaly I despise Norton. It is a very very resource hungry application, takes over your computer (if norton dont want you to do it, well then you aint gonna do it!) slows everything down and sometimes is a bitch to uninstall!

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That applies on most Norton proucts, NAV, Norton Utilities and extra ...

Regards :)

Being behind a router is one of the best ways to protect your PC, especially if you have more then one PC hooked up to it.
A good program for under $50.00 (US/CAN) is Trend Micro I have been using this for 3 yrs and have never had any problems, (won't work with Zone Alarm though). It has POP/SMTP scanning, Spyware scanning and a real time emergancy disconnect from the internet when it detects a network virus.

I agree with the statements about Norton, any time my company purchases those stupid OEM's (Compaq's) I immediatley remove the Norton software, which is a chore.

But if you are after the free versions, then ZA or Sygate is plenty sufficient for home use. :cool:

IF you have Win Xp (with all of the updates) their firewall (not the best) should be adequate behind a router.

I have a westell dsl modem/router/firewall that I use with sygate and I'm happy with them. But then again I mainly run Macintosh. I watch what I download on my windows machine pretty carefuly too.

Another thing you could do would be to close all the ports that your not using.

Just my 2 cents

thanks for all the input, I'll definately look for an alternative to Norton. I agree with the fact that it can be a resource hog, but i've never found anything better. I'm a security freak especially when it comes to my network. I check the logs and the router filters out a lot of stuff. My ISP gets some as well (just from tests i've run with my friends). All of my ports are stealthed (either because i forward closed ports to unused ips on my network, or because my router is set to stealth) and XP is always completely updated on all our comps. Like most of you said i dont really need to much. Just a firewall, mail filtering would be nice and an antispyware program. If it did all three that would be awesome. I'm currently using norton for firewall and AV, microsoft antispyware for spyware. I'll probably be doing 2-3 computers at once when i actually update, making free the best solution. I've looked into all of them, but i was wondering which ones took up the least amount of RAM and processing power (and especially startup time). Thnx again for all the help, i have a good idea of what i should be looking for now.

Dont think that just because you are behind a router you are safe and dont need a firewall as some have said. Routers can be by-passed in numerous ways. If someone does by-pass your router and you have no other protection whats to stop an attacker from doing what he wants??

Also, yes a router will stop the casual attacker but what stops programs on your computer from accessing other networks/internet etc?? You need a software firewall on your box, even if it is just for program control.

i wasn't saying i didnt need one, only that i dont think i need anything to hard core, only enought to do what you just talked about and maybe a little more. like i said email scanning, AV, antispyware, program monitoring. The cheeper the better but i want the best quality i can get as well. It should actually work :)

If you have a spare computer you can also check out smoothwall.
There are a lot of easy hacks to block websites, ports, and even set when pc's can access the net.

Right now I am using 2.0 and have port forwarding used for 2 pc's, I have iptables setup to block several ports (mostly viruses) and I have acl rules setup to block a few websites that seam to cause problems.

Best part smoothwall is free. And very reliable, My smoothwall only gets turned off when it storms other than that its on on average 2 months without shutting down.
Put a switch behind that and you have a decent secure (funny word) network.

i use Zone Alarm, and it is free for residential use, and is very powerful.

Does it like... use the force and that! dum dum dum dum dee dum dum dee dum!

// Welcome to AO by the way... padawan!