good freeware firewall for win 7??....

Hi, I am looking for a good light weight freeware/open source firewall of similar.

I uses to run Sygate Personal FW and am looking for something similar. What I liked about that one is that it told me when any application (legit or not, even when windows would try) I could then allow, deny or block. It also warned me about any odd incoming connections as well.

You'd be amazed at how many or our app are trying to phone home all the time, quite often sharing not so small bits of your personal information with them.

Thanks

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Hi,

glasswave said:

Hi, I am looking for a good light weight freeware/open source firewall of similar.

Click to expand...

You're probably not aware of the fact, that Win7 already has very good firewall built-in.

glasswave said:

... it told me when any application (legit or not, even when windows would try) I could then allow, deny or block. It also warned me about any odd incoming connections as well.

Click to expand...

..which is something, built-in firewall does as well. Just learn how to set it up -which can be tricky, I know.
To make it easier for you, get free Sphinx firewall control:
http://www.sphinx-soft.com/Vista/order.html
-which is a "control panel" for existing Win7 firewall.
Believe me, you don't need anything else.

glasswave said:

You'd be amazed at how many or our app are trying to phone home all the time, quite often sharing not so small bits of your personal information with them.

Click to expand...

-not with Windows built-in firewall, if used properly.

Bogdan

thanks for the reply.

I am aware of windows FW. I have a fee4ling that it will ignore windows based and other processes that it feels is safe allowing them net accesss. Anyways, I would prefer something that was not part of windows.

hbx2004 said:

glasswave said:

Hi, I am looking for a good light weight freeware/open source firewall of similar.

Click to expand...

You're probably not aware of the fact, that Win7 already has very good firewall built-in.

hbx2004 said:

... it told me when any application (legit or not, even when windows would try) I could then allow, deny or block. It also warned me about any odd incoming connections as well.

Click to expand...

..which is something, built-in firewall does as well. Just learn how to set it up -which can be tricky, I know. To make it easier for you, get free Sphynx firewall control:
http://www.sphinx-soft.com/Vista/order.html
-which is a "control panel" for existing Win7 firewall.
Believe me, you don't need anything else.

hbx2004 said:

You'd be amazed at how many or our app are trying to phone home all the time, quite often sharing not so small bits of your personal information with them.

Click to expand...

-not with Windows built-in firewall, if used properly.

Bogdan

Click to expand...

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There is simply too much beauty in the world to photograph it all, but I'm trying.

You may want to try the free version of the Comodo Firewall.

I used it for a while. But, the last time I installed Win 7, I just stayed with the Win 7 Firewall, as I rarely use Windows for anything anyway. I run Mepis 11 (a Linux distro using a Debian Stable base, with community supported repos enabled for newer versions of apps) around 99% of the time.

So, the last time I did a clean install of Win 7 on my primary desktop, I forgot to install the Comodo Firewall again, and I just let the install default to using the Firewall built into Win 7 (which doesn't give you any information about apps that are trying to "phone home", although there are some third party front ends to it that do that kind of thing that allow you to tweak it's behavior).

Basically, I only use Win 7 for checking problems reported by others using IE (I'm the "Forums Manager" and Administrator for a Digital Camera Review site), sometimes helping out with camera reviews where I may need to install a camera manufacturer's software in Win 7.

So, I don't boot into Win 7 very often except to update the Operating System, Antivirus databases (I use Avira Antivir Premium), browsers, and plugins (Adobe Flash Player, Acrobat Reader, etc.).

But, the last time I did use the free version of the Comodo Firewall, it seemed to do fine, and it did support alerts when applications are trying to phone home (and I think it came already configured with a "white list" of commonly used apps, but you can probably modify it's behavior for stricter control).

You'll see a download link to the free version of it on the right side of this page:

http://personalfirewall.comodo.com/

It seemed to "play nice" with other security products I had running (Avira Antivir Premium, ThreatFire, the M86 Security Add-on in Firefox and more), too,

Note that I also use Comodo Secure DNS (which doesn't require any software to work), since they maintain a real time blacklist of pages with malicious content and that gives me another layer of security.

Basically, you just plug their DNS Server Addresses into your Firewall (and you can access most Firewalls via http://192.168.1.1 ), so that it uses the Comodo DNS servers instead of the defaults (routers will default to the DNS servers used by your ISP unless you configure them otherwise). Here are the IP Addresses you'd use for your Primary and Secondary DNS servers in your router's configuration screens:

8.26.56.26
8.20.247.20

More about Comodo Secure DNS here:

http://www.comodo.com/secure-dns/

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JimC

glasswave said:

Hi, I am looking for a good light weight freeware/open source firewall of similar.

Click to expand...

http://www.sphinx-soft.com/Vista/

Specifically, the free edition.

It's the lightest weight and most stable firewall I've found, by far. The user interface is a bit naff but I find it usable.

Almost every other firewall I've tried has conflicted with some application or another. And/or greatly reduced Windows stability.

Up to Win7 it really was necessary to use another firewall but the one now in with Win7 is so good, I no longer use anything else. You still need a good AV though - I can thoroughly recommend AVIRA - their free version is also excellent.
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I would also recommend Comodo firewall for PC's. It is very robust and it does not interfere with other applications. Window 7 firewall may be OK but I have had too many problems with Microsoft updates trashing my system to use its firewall product even if I trusted Microsoft's ability to engineer such a product which I do not.

Comodo +1, also does sandboxing and is very wel self-learning.

joey_B said:

Comodo +1, also does sandboxing and is very wel self-learning.

Click to expand...

Yep...

Since my last post, I booted into Win 7, downloaded and installed the Comodo Firewall again (as I neglected to reinstall it the last time I reinstalled Win 7 on my primary desktop).

After running it for a while in Win 7, it seems to be working fine, and I've also got Avira Antivir Premium 2012 and Threatfire installed, as well as the M86 Security Plugin for Firefox (running in Firefox 10.01).

IOW, they appear to "play nice" with each other.

Now, one thing I did is remove the Comodo "Geek Buddy" program that gets installed along with the Comdo Firewall (that allows you to chat with one of their technicians online to resolve issues).

I removed GeekBuddy because I noticed that CLPS.exe (the GeekBuddy program) was eating over 50MB of memory.

So, I just used the add/remove programs feature in Control Panel and got rid of it (you'll find a separate listing for Comodo Geek Buddy) to free up the memory being used (since I wouldn't use it anyway). I got an alert from ThreatFire while removing it (as it considers that kind of removal as suspicious activity). But, it removed just fine when I told ThreatFire to let it continue.

I also got rid of the Periodic "advert style" messages in the System Tray (join us on Facebook, etc.). That's easy enough to do (just open Comodo, go to Preferences and uncheck the box to "Enable Message Center" so that you don't see constant news, etc. about Comodo).

After those steps, so far, so good. The latest version of Comodo Firewall is working fine along with the latest versions of Avira Antivir Premium and Threatfire under 64 Bit Win 7 (as it did the last time I was using the Comodo Firewall with earlier versions of Avira and Threatfire). Here's an old post about that combo:

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1004&message=37332867

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JimC

+1 Comodo Personal Firewall. Using the 64-bit version. I don't have any of the issues I had with their 3.x versions (used have tons of problems with Defense+). The 5.x releases have been great, http://www.matousec.com/ does some testing on Windows firewalls. Worth a peek.

glasswave said:

Hi, I am looking for a good light weight freeware/open source firewall of similar.

I uses to run Sygate Personal FW and am looking for something similar. What I liked about that one is that it told me when any application (legit or not, even when windows would try) I could then allow, deny or block. It also warned me about any odd incoming connections as well.

You'd be amazed at how many or our app are trying to phone home all the time, quite often sharing not so small bits of your personal information with them.

Thanks

--

There is simply too much beauty in the world to photograph it all, but I'm trying.

Click to expand...

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There is simply too much beauty in the world to photograph it all, but I'm trying.

I didn't realize how good it was until reading the results at the site that SithTracy posted a link to earlier in this thread here (scroll down and you'll see how products compared):

http://www.matousec.com/projects/proactive-security-challenge-64/results.php

It looks like Comodo came out on top in their earlier tests, too.

http://www.matousec.com/projects/proactive-security-challenge/results.php

So, I'm glad that you started this thread, as it served as a reminder that I neglected to reinstall the Comodo Firewall again the last time I performed a clean install of Win 7 on my primary desktop.

That problem as now been solved, and it looks like Comodo offers a lot more protection than other Firewall products, as it's apparently helping to prevent malware, too (offering more than a typical Firewall product provides).

So, even though I don't use Windows much anymore (I tend to run in Linux most of the time), it looks like making sure the Comodo Firewall is installed will add an additional layer of protection above and beyond what I would have with the AV products I already use in Windows (Avira Antivir Premium, ThreatFire, the M86 Security Add-on for Firefox, making sure I run in a Standard User Account without Admin permissions, etc.)

So, if I need to perform a clean install of Windows again for any reason, I'll remember to make sure to reinstall Comodo's Firewall again, too (as it worked fine when I was using it a while back in 64 Bit Win 7 with the other security products I use, and I see no reason that it won't work the same way again, as it appears to "play nice" with my other malware prevention tools).

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JimC