PC Tools Firewall Plus ??

[ofield1]

HI,

Is PC Tools Firewall Plus, better than the Firewall that comes
with Widows XP Pro ?

Thanks for the help.

[redwudz]

Just about anything is better than the firewall that comes with Windows. A freeware one to look into is Comodo: http://www.personalfirewall.comodo.com/

[guns1inger]

Comodo has been very well behaved here for quite some time now, as well as on a dozen or so other machines. Between that, Spyware Blaster, Spybot and AVG, nothing has made it's way onto my machine that should not be there (or wasn't invited). Using Firefox instead of IE will also make a big difference to your safety and peace of mind.

[Poppa_Meth]

Comodo is very good but not exactly user friendly. I just switched from AVG to Avast AV last night and while installation went fine, I spent about an hour configuring Comodo to allow Avast to auto update.

You may want to look at Online Armor as well. The paid version is as good as Comodo and the free version is very good as well. Both are much easier to use. Depends on how much you want to play with your firewall.

[guns1inger]

The only time I had to manually configure a rule in Comodo was for uTorrent. Everything else has self configured in learning mode. I tried Avast in the past and found it cumbersome and very resource hungry. Has this changed ? I use their Bart PE based recovery system, which is pretty good for what it does.

[serega]

Will switching from IE to Safari 3 help to secure browsing a little more?

[Poppa_Meth]

I have used AVG for many years now but I've heard it's detection rate and what it can do with what it finds has gotten worse over the years. Avast is suppose to be much better in those regards. I can honestly say that after the switch last night my PC boots and runs faster than it did before. The only change was the AV so I can only assume AVG has gotten a bit more bloated than it was. Also AVG Paid has gone to V8 now and it combine the anti-spyware into it. From what I've heard there are all kinds of issues with it. I decided to ditch the Free version before it was upgraded to a similar mess. There is also Avira Free you could consider. It's suppose to be quite good though there is a nag screen when it updates.

I doubt switching to Safari will help much if running Windows. It may be more secure but Safari just isn't that great on Windows so far. Firefox or Opera would be better under Windows. I use Firefox with Adblock Plus and NoScript for maximum security.

[RickA]

Greets,

While software firewalls are nice... Another (more secure in my opinion) option would be a hardware router w/ firewall unit.

Cheers,
Rick

[SanderMan]

I'm Using PCtools firewall plus and I like it a lot. It's more user friendly than Comodo. I used Sygate before, but that doesn't work on Vista.