XP Firewall

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SafetyMan

How good is XP's Firewall? I have been having problems w/Norton's firewall
not allowing me to download images on web pages so I have switched XP's
firwall on, but I am a bit leary of Microsoft's ability to get it right.
SafetyMan
 
It's not that Microsoft didn't get it right. It's just that they included a
stripped down version, as they do with most of their inclusions. This gives
others a chance to get you to upgrade to their product. I did this by
purchasing ZoneAlarm Pro.
 
Well, I really don't know much about the Windows firewall
but the Norton Firewall should work fine. I have it and
it works perfectly. You might wanna try the settings in
there. Just in case.
 
SafetyMan said:
How good is XP's Firewall? I have been having problems w/Norton's firewall
not allowing me to download images on web pages so I have switched XP's
firewall on, but I am a bit leary of Microsoft's ability to get it right.
Click to expand...

Works fine, as far as it goes, for INcoming hits...

But it is not designed to monitor OUTgoing traffic. So if an "intruder"
is covertly installed, the XP firewall won't detect its attempts to send info.
 
Greetings --

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 or Sygate are 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. (Just the elimination of most pop-up ads
on the Internet made the price worth-while to me.)


Bruce Chambers

--
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You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on
having both at once. -- RAH
 
It seems adequate to me. To test your vulnability before enabling the
firewall, go to http://scan.sygate.com/ and do the quick scan to see what
open ports your system has. Open ports are vulnabilities. Then enable the
firewall and retest. For a full test you should do all 6 types of scans.

Bob
 
Firewalls are just ON/OFF switches, if the page loads
anything at all, the firewall is open. Content or security
settings are more likely to be what is blocking your
downloads. These could be Java or ActiveX, anti-virus or
some other setting.

As other have said, XPs firewall has fewer user settings and
does not alert you to port probes or block Trojans from
getting out.

If you want a different firewall than Norton, try the free
Zone Alarm from www.zonelabs.com


| How good is XP's Firewall? I have been having problems
w/Norton's firewall
| not allowing me to download images on web pages so I have
switched XP's
| firwall on, but I am a bit leary of Microsoft's ability to
get it right.
| SafetyMan
|
|
 
Well, for some reason my version is not behaving and has decided to block
many images. Once I converted to XP's firewall all of a web page's images
now download. It has something to do with how a web pages loads images from
different servers or somethng like that. From what I gathered while looking
at Norton's site the "fix" appears complicated to me.

So, as I asked in my original post, is XP's firewall any good?

Safetyman
 
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