xp firewall

  • Thread starter Thread starter mandie
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mandie

hi i know this may sound totally thick but i have just
bought a new computer on my old one i was running win 98
and had installed a firewall zonealarm. i have now got
win xp and activated its firewall. am i safe not to
install another or is the built in one enough?
 
The XP built in firewall good but could be better (I understand the new and
improved ICF coming out with SP2 is going to address many shortcomings like
monitoring outbound traffic by application). Any firewall is better than
none and if you were comfortable with ZoneAlarm, by all means install it and
turn off XPs built-in firewall (two firewalls running at the same time tend
to get in each others way.

Rick
 
Greetings --

WinXP's built-in firewall is _adequate_ at stopping incoming
attacks, and hiding 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 even ask you about) the bad or
the questionable out-going packets. It assumes that any application
you have on your hard drive is there because you want it there, and
therefore has your "permission" to access the Internet.

ZoneAlarm, Kerio, or Sygate are all much better than WinXP's
built-in firewall, and are much more easily configured, and there are
free versions of each readily available. Even Symantec's Norton
Personal Firewall is superior by far, although it does take a heavier
toll of system performance then do ZoneAlarm or Sygate.


Bruce Chambers
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having both at once. -- RAH
 
It's good enough if you don't allow any incoming connections, but it dosen't check outgoing connections like ZoneAlarm does. I've read that SP2 for XP will have a firewall similar to what ZoneAlarm is doing now.
 
The others all give great topics. Just make sure u do not
run 2 firewalls(windows and say zonealarm) or they could
interfere with each other.
 
hi i know this may sound totally thick but i have just
bought a new computer on my old one i was running win 98
and had installed a firewall zonealarm. i have now got
win xp and activated its firewall. am i safe not to
install another or is the built in one enough?
Click to expand...

I cannot offer "expert" advice like some of the others, perhaps, but
having also moved from Win98 with ZoneAlarm to WinXP Pro I have kept
the XP firewall turned off and continued to use ZoneAlarm.

ZoneAlarm suits what I need exactly and gives me precisely the sort of
control I require. Whether or not XP's gives the same level of
control I cannot say but as another poster suggested, if you're
comfortable with ZA and it does what you want then stick with it.

Having recently set up a wireless LAN I found it no problem in ZA to
add the individual LAN IP addresses of local machines to be able to
see and access one another (albeit subject to restrictions within the
local security and group policy on each machine). Even though there
is a fairly competent firewall on the router I still run ZA on all
local machines.

Hope this is helpful.
 
I run Sygate with the built in XP firewall. I had no choice, when I
disabled the XP firewall I keep on getting hack attempts targeting
svchost. Sygate blocked them and I configured it to block the traffic
from the offending IP for 10 hours. It was just very annoying having
that flashing Sygate icon constantly going so I put the XP firewall up
as well. The only problem is that my system seems a little slower. I'm
talking about dozens of attacks a day all from Verizon IP. I use
Verizon and contacted their security and told them of this but it
didn't seem to help. I like Sygate because it lets me identify the
intruders IP.
 
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