Are there any good free firewalls left?

PoloMint

Last year, after about 7 years of constant use and recommending it to many many people I finally gave up on Zone Alarm as it was causing Firefox to take 5 seconds to load and causing some crashes.

I switched to Comodo Firewall (free) and was very happy with it until tonight when I finally discovered that it was what was causing my laptop to crash on about 1/5 resumes from standby. It had to be completely uninstalled to stop the crashing rather than just not running.

Anyway I now have no firewall on this machine except the vista one, are there any good free ones left that you can recommend? Or am I going to have to pay some money, and if so, what should I get?

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irart

Five seconds to load - you must be very impatient! I have used Zone Alarm for years now with never a problem until the recent Microsoft update causing an inability to connect to the internet, which is now sorted by a Zone Alarm update. If it is causing crashes as you say, it could very well be something else that is the problem.

rolfw

If someone is only going to pay for one piece of software, then make it a good firewall antivirus, I use AVG Antivirus plus Firewall and find it very effective.

A couple of our members have mentioned _www.personalfirewall.comodo.com as being a good free one.

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gerryl

Good router and bin yer software firewall...what yer computer breath

jimbo

I like AVG and have installed it for a couple of friends. I'm using F-Secure which is very good at picking up any changes.

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Jimbo

compufunk

Sygate Personal Firewall is free for personal use and, I have found it to be light on system resources. I haven't tried it with vista though.

To be honest, If your behind a router I don't see much need for a software firewall. Especially if you have a well kept system with regular AV and Spyware/Malware scanning.

portly

Go for Comodo firewall and Avira free antivirus two of the best, and comodo are about to bring out a Free security suite with av3 included, which im really cant wait for these two are the best out there easily, you might also like to get superantispyware free edition, spywareblaster, and revo uninstaller, Ccleaner,auslogics defrag all freeware and good performersPS avira will give you a popup when you update your definitons ,but thats no problem cause it bloody good

portly

Funny i had a simular problem with comodo, i updated spywareblaster then after alittle while things started going titties up i remove SB and all is well now ,ive run scans but nothing has come up, i also had a vista update not long before the problem started, not sure that wasnt the cause, but everything is working ok now.I no the vista update effects zonealarm firewalls so that might be your first problems sorted, there is an update from zonealarm to fix it