Personal firewall unwanted?

[wn van deursen]

(This refers to a sept 1st post by Nul|)
A lot of people advise to turn your personal firewall off, in particular when you're not OnLine continuously and got no naughty secrets in your personal files. But I recently swapped Norton '02 for Norton Internet Security '03 and all hell broke loose- it started screaming about files trying to get to Internet, and I clicked away like mad on Blocking & Ok but such didn't help very much. Found out later that I sheltered spyware from the Gator Company, and it's been going on for some time. I cleaned out my pc and got rid of it, but this shows that NIS03 is an alert little devil, right?
On the other hand; my Internetting got a lot slower (speed down from 56 kbps to 44), pagehopping takes ages, pages are often Not Found, I loose my Incall connection more often, incoming/outgoing mail procedures are not going well, and my Norton journal just notified me cheerily that an update package got lost because it was Blocked (this over-extensive filtering Nul| talks about?)...
Maybe all this could be added to the list "Pro's & Contra's of Personal Firewalls". Unless my problems have nothing to do with the NIS packet?

 

[Perris Calderon]

norton firewall is known to slow your box down.

switch to sygate free...better, will not slow you down.

yes, most programs try to access the intenet for updates, etc...

these firewalls will tell you when that happens, and you will be more in controll

 

[gothic]

I'v used both Sygate Pro 5.0 and ZoneAlarm 3.xx (which is on now) but always have XP's own firewall off. Both Sygate and ZoneAlarm check outgoing as well as incoming and you're right about the bl**dy spyware (use ad-aware regularly now). I find that once I have trained ZA which are allowed in or out it just sits in the background minding it's own business.
Most importantly tho' is the fact that neither of these have any noticably detremental effect on the speed of my internet.

TOK

 

[damnyank]

Originally posted by gothic
I find that once I have trained ZA which are allowed in or out it just sits in the background minding it's own business.

I know others will disagree - but I have found this to be very true - I am happy with ZA (freebie) and once "trained" has done what I feel is a fine job for me and my surfing habits!

 

[Burpster]

i think most software firewalls work pretty well ....i use norton appz because there ummmm....free ...well kinda ...lol

 

[wn van deursen]

re Personal firewall unwanted

Now that I know that the slowless comes with the firewall and is not a system ailment I feel reassured. If it gets bothersome I'll try ZoneAlarm for a change. I thank you folks for the support.