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Friday, December 11, 2009

Best Free Firewall

Best Free Firewall

Introduction

No other freeware product causes as much angst to users, whether in installation or day-to-day use, as a firewall. To find a stable and high quality firewall for windows often involves a process of trial and error. Firewalls should protect while not being too intrusive or too complicated to handle. This article gives you a selection of the best free software firewalls available.

If you want to learn more about firewalls, visit these excellent sites: How Firewalls Work and Microsoft Security Firewalls FAQ. If you don't decide to use one of the firewall products in the article, at least remember to turn on the Windows firewall. Be sure to use only one software firewall at a time. But feel free to combine a hardware and a software firewall to improve protection. Additionally, most products highly recommend uninstalling other third-party software firewalls before installation (and disabling the Windows firewall if they don't).

Oh, and I always create a drive image or restore point before installing a new firewall since they are known to give your PC serious problems if they conflict with anything. I installed and uninstalled each firewall several times during testing and had no major problems, but I was careful to make sure each one uninstalled cleanly before installing another firewall (often with Revo/Zsoft Uninstaller and additional cleaning as needed with CCleaner/Autoruns, or with a fresh drive image or restore point).

Firewalls are increasingly useful to help you control the activities of Internet facing applications. Many users now leave their Internet on all the time, increasing their risk to malware. It's also becoming difficult to tell when applications connect online because they link so many of their features to Internet resources. Few programs stop to ask your permission. So I predict that firewalls will be ever more important for privacy and control.

I organized the article into two sections: (I) software firewalls for broad protection and greater user involvement; (II) software firewalls for basic protection and less user involvement.

Read more...
http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-firewall.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+gizmosbest+%28Gizmo%27s+Best-ever+Freeware%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Don

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