Even the free Z-alarm works fine with XP Home or XP Pro, you have other issues..... like hardware drivers or a AMD processor issue.
Anyway, the choice for free firewalls are: ZA Sygate Kerio Outpost I have used the free personal version of Sygate for 3 yrs now and know it works. Later John ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dave Tutelman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2005 3:16 PM Subject: Re: ShopTalk: Clubmaker Online Update > At 02:20 PM 3/9/2005, you wrote: > >I've been busy upgrading my web site with a new shopping cart (someone > >please revive Dave T. as I'm sure he just passed out). > > DaveT has been on the verge of passing out for the better part of a day -- > but for a totally different reason. > > I'm in the middle of an equally major computer update. Just got a brand-new > PC to replace the six-year-old model I've been using. Moving everything to > the new PC has been a trip. I haven't done this in over four years, and it > includes a major OS upgrade as well (98 to XP-Pro). I'm probably about half > done now. But I think (hope?) the hard part is done. I have a network > connection and my main browsers and emailer working now, and have moved my > mailboxes, address book, and bookmarks -- and all are working fine. I > assure you they were NOT working fine a few hours ago. I've been on the > phone with tech support twice today. > > Actually, it was never the computer's fault that I was having problems. > Much of the difficulty turned out to be a battle royal between XP and > ZoneAlarm. I know I've been a big defender of ZoneAlarm in the past. I > still think it's great, but I probably won't be using it on the new > machine. Here's the problem I ran into: > * Windows XP-Pro has a built-in firewall. I turned it off so I could use > ZA as my firewall. > * A lot of installations require reboot, and -- loading a new machine -- > I was of course doing a lot of installations. > * The first such reboot after I installed ZA and disabled the XP > firewall, the machine got completely out of control. It would boot to the > point that you had some control, but the load-at-startup programs were > still loading. As soon as ZA put up its "loading now" banner, the machine > would crash and begin another reboot. Something in ZA was conflicting with > something in XP. > * Of course, this made it impossible to fix, because it was never up long > enough for me to remove or even disable ZA, so the machine was in an > endless reboot cycle. Part of the problem seems to be that the XP firewall > comes up ON rather than the way I left it when I shut down the machine. > > I eventually learned from Tech Support how to put XP into Safe Mode. After > that it was easy to fix. But the fix was to remove ZA. According to > ShieldsUp, the Microsoft firewall seems to be protecting me from outside > probes as well as ZoneAlarm did. But it does not protected from trojan > horses. (Explanation: the ZA program control screen requires you to > explicitly permit a program to call OUT of the computer; it isn't just > INWARD protection like the XP firewall. So if a trojan (adware? virus? etc) > got on your machine and tries to call out: > * The XP firewall would never know nor care. > * The ZA firewall would ask the user for permission, and block the call > without explicit permission. No, it's not really that annoying. It pops a > permission window. You can say OK, No, OK for all time, or No for all time. > The "for all time" responses give blanket permission or denial, and that > program never pops the permission window again. > > Bottom line: ZA is a better, more secure firewall, but it can't coexist > with XP. > > DaveT > > > -- > No virus found in this outgoing message. > Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. > Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.7.1 - Release Date: 3/9/2005 > > >
