personal firewall

I put my thumbs up for ZoneAlarm too. Been using it for a few years. Very good piece of software.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that you can also use ZoneLog to look at the ZoneAlarm log files in a VERY organized interface. You can get ZoneLog from here

Must agree. ZoneAlarm together with ZoneLog works good. And very userfriendly.

Sygate is also great.

SYgate is my personal fav. its a good choice

I used to use sygate, but then I found that it was a little heavy on the memory and put in a bit of performance lag.. however it does have a lot of advanced features if you so require.. I know of small networks running NAT'd behind the sygate PF.. (not a good idea). However its really gone downhill off late..

Now zonealarm is really a top top top notch product. They just got bought over by Check Point.. who make enterprise firewalls.. the latest version of ZA Pro has another really awesome feature called 'ID Lock'.. where basically you can store information like your email address, PIN number, Credit card number etc in a 'vault'.... if anything on your system tries to send this confidential information out, you get a warning and the option of allowing or denying it. This is really a great feature considering the amount of spyware floating around these days.. I applaud the ZA guys for a wonderful idea.

That said, don't bother getting the version with built in antivirus, I believe in separation of duties.. let the firewall handle access control and leave the virus scanning to a dedicated virus scanner (I recommend Kaspersky, its light years ahead of Norton).

Zonealarm sits on all my Windows boxen.

Cheers,

Never did like zone alarm to big of a foot print(Too big program). Which suprises me that you say sygate uses to much memory i always felt ZA and tried to do "much". Did alot of PC repair back in the day and zone alarm would cause so many errors on start up or totally kill people internet connection even after we would uninstall zone alarm we would have to do some cleaning in the registry to get it working. THat was back then had no idea about Chech point so maybe its a better software now. Also i tried in on my own PC it would ask if a certain program could gain acces i would say YES and remember my answer....It never remembered drove me nuts hehe

Hmm, when did you use it, I can tell you that it doesn't have those issues now.... As for doing too much, you get three options

Zonealarm free - Just a simple firewall.. what most people need
Zonealarm Pro - More features, advanced rules, ID-Lock etc. What I use
Zonealarm Suite - Too much stuff IMHO.. I dont want my firewall handling my anti-virus..

If you're Joe User, go with the free one, you will have to train it for a day before it stops asking you questions.. If you know what you're doing, go with Pro, its worth it.