I agree that Norton firewall products are really poor pieces of software. I am old enough to remember when each release of the Norton Utilities was something to look forward to (along with its main competitor Central Point’s PC Tools..too bad Symantec swallowed them both, and belched some really stinky software in their places). But there are other alternatives to Zone Alarm, which I find really intrusive at its default settings. Sygate’s free Personal Firewall is still available on the net and works well. Also, Comodo offers what is purported to be THE BEST available for free.

I agree with you about the intrusiveness of ZoneAlarm, but my experience has been that inexperienced users have less problems with it than Sygate. Sygate’s free Personal Firewall may still be available on the net, but not for much longer - Symantec has owned Sygate for about six months now and has ditched the Sygate Personal Firewall. Thanks for the tip on Comodo Firewall Pro - I hadn’t heard of them before and I’ll have to try it out.

I think Zone Alarm is the best but getting hammered with issues on Version 7 of the product. We have V6 on all our laptops for those who travel and it saves me many hours of rebuilding as users’ machines are well protected (talking about the Suite install of course).

First of all, ZoneAlarm Free is crap… it might be good for a novice but even then it’s just not granular.

Second, I can vouch for Comodo… VERY nice free firewall… Jetico is nice too.

Third, maybe I’m missing something here but there is a practical way to stop all outbound connections unless specifically allowed. Go to Administrative Tools –> Windows Firewall with Advanced Security, create some outbound rules such as:

TCP - originating port (all) - destination ports (25,53,80,110,443) and that will cover most basic users. You can get much more granular obviously. Then go to the three Firewall profiles and then select Outbound connections that do not match a rule are blocked - Presto… what am I missing here?

ZoneAlarm Free is crap - to you. Most people don’t have your or my level of knowledge and experience. For them it works just fine - and they can use it despite their lack of knowledge. As for its lack of granularity, true - but how many users outside of a corporate network need granularity? I run up to ten computers on my network but don’t run any servers or any gaming applications that require Internet access - and almost all home networks are like mine - albeit probably running fewer computers.

Well sure, that’s why it’s called my opinion =)

Also, I did make a note that it is made more for the novice user but I also made an exception that it’s still not necessarily good for a novice because of the total lack of granularity (note I am talking about the free version here). For example, my wife is an accountant at a CPA firm and has many client computers that she uses VPN’s/RDP’s in order to get their financial information. One of her clients is using ZoneAlarm free and she says it’s an utter hassle because the client says there is no way for her to allow in certain connections via a single TCP or UDP port. So the client has to disable the entire firewall while my wife connects… not very good in my opinion and a little granularity is needed, even if it is hidden.

Believe me, I know it’s tough to find a firewall suitable for everyone and I know I made a sweeping statement saying it was crap… but it’s just my opinion that there ARE better products out there, even for novices. For my clients, I usually install Comodo and train it myself before I give it back to them. Then all it takes is a quick 5-10 minutes to explain how it works; most will never even see a prompt unless they install something new that requires internet access for which I explained how to account for during the quick 5-10 minutes.

First note that the topic was personal firewalling on Vista. Comodo’s firewall does not yet run on Vista and I don’t know one way or the other whether ZoneAlarm (free or Pro) does.

Second, yes ZoneAlarm Pro is a really good firewall. However, their free firewall is lagging and has been showing some holes/leaks lately. Check out the following review (mostly of other other reviews):

http://www.consumersearch.com/www/software/firewalls/index.html

The gist was that Comodo was the best or nearly the best free firewall.

Again, still waiting on a Vista update.

I’m waiting on Vista updates too - it wasn’t quite ready for prime time, was it? Hopefully soon….

Terces, I’m going to try Comodo - unfortunately I’m getting ready to move 1200 km away so it’ll be a bit before I do - but it sounds really good.

I’ve been testing Comodo on my laptop for the past two months - what an intrusive piece of software! It continually asks me for permission for EVERY new port a program tries to access the internet with - I hate it! It’s too much for me, let alone my non-technical customers! I’ll be switching back to Sygate Personal Firewall and will continue to give ZoneAlarm to my customers.