Freeware Firewalls?

05/30/2003 | TMMT

[LibKill]

I have used the freeware version of ZoneAlarm for some years, and so have my friends. It works good.

[Clinging Bitterly]

I wouldn't be too quick to condemn Zone Alarm, it is pretty much the standard. I doubt that it, in and of itself, is a huge drain on resources. I've used it for a number of years on this old 450 MHz clunker and it's no problem here. There was one version I downloaded from their site about six months ago that seemed to cause some strange behavior in my 98SE system, so I fell back to the earlier version. Since then, I have upgraded to XP Pro, and downloaded the most current version of ZA, which I am using now. The Freeware version offers plenty of protection. ME isn't the most highly recommended version of Windows. I'm not sure what it offers over plain old 98SE. You'd probably be better off switching to 2K Pro or XP.

Dave in Eugene

[Clinging Bitterly]

Interesting. You have 2.6.362 using 4.7M, and I have 3.7.159 here using 2.9M, and yeah, very little cpu usage. I notice the memory usage goes up about 600K if you open the user interface to view the activity log.

Dave in Eugene