Which firewall?

[miles G]

Thanks Bruce Chambers for your contributions here about
blocking fake MS spam emails in this group - very
informative and helpful.
Despite enabling the XP firewall and blocking mail (hiding
to nothing there I think - my guess is that the worms that
are responsible automatically modify the sender address
every time) I'm thinking of installing Zone Alarm, despite
reading some unfavourable reports. (my system is non-
networked, single user running XP home 5.1.2600, Intel
2.4Gb processor 512Mb RAM, so am assuming ZoneAlarm will
be stable).
Is this the best Firewall?
Might ZA conflict with the built-in XP Home firewall, and
should I disable the latter first?
Is it advisable to create a Sys Restore point first, so
that I can uninstall ZA completely if I don't or the
system doesn't like it? Or is this just risibly neurotic?
Miles G

 

[Andrej Budja [MVP]]

You usually don't want multiple firewalls installed. One is enough.

ZA is not that bad. It provides some features not available in XP
firewall.

Andrej

 

[Ph0eniX]

I would go with a hardware firewall (if you have High Speed Inet access)
between the modem and the PC. Something like LinkSys BEFSX41 would do the
trick (search www.amazon.com for it).

 

[Miles G]

Thanks Andre
Regards
Miles

-----Original Message-----
You usually don't want multiple firewalls installed. One is enough.

ZA is not that bad. It provides some features not available in XP
firewall.

Andrej



.

 

[Bruce Chambers]

Greetings --

You're welcome.

A firewall will do nothing to stop the spam emails. For this,
you'll have to create an email client rule based upon the more common
of the subject lines used - the senders are spoofed and entirely
random. Even then, I doubt it's possible to stop all of them, but you
should be able to significantly reduce the number you receive..

WinXP's built-in firewall is fine at stopping incoming attacks, and
hiding all of your ports from probes. It doesn't give you any alarms
to tell you that it is working, though. What WinXP also does not do,
is protect you from any Trojans or spyware that you might download and
install inadvertently. It doesn't monitor out-going traffic at all,
much less block (or at least ask you about) the bad or the
questionable out-going packets.

ZoneAlarm, Kerio, or Sygate are all much better, and there are a
free versions
available. Personally, I've been very happy with Symantec's Norton
Internet Security 2002 (NIS 2004 is now available), which includes
Norton AntiVirus, Norton Personal Firewall, parental controls, privacy
controls, and ad blocking. If you do install a 3rd party firewall,
disable WinXP's built-in firewall to preclude the chance of conflicts.

Creating a System Restore point is a wise precaution to take
before installing any major application.

Bruce Chambers

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