Vista firewall on notebook

Hello, all. I'm tuning up a Vista notebook for someone and it currently uses Outpost Pro firewall. I was wondering, in light of moving Win7 setups to using Windows firewall, if the built-in firewall on Vista is also good enough for inbound control? Normally the notebook is used behind a home router, but there would be occasions when it's used in the wild. Is there anything that should be considered when using the Vista firewall? I've looked around and most of it's the subjective "Windows firewall is good enough" vs "get a third party firewall", A vs B type discussion, which I'm not after -- I'm merely asking if anyone has advice on using it securely, or if it's a waste of time.

Thanks!
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JFYI:
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/thre...ith-advanced-security-guide-for-vista.239750/

 

Windows firewall is ok for inbound control. However, Outpost firewall isn't just a tough, configurable, old school, firewall. It's also has one of the best HIPS in the business and a few other nifty features. Windows firewall has none of that. Though they can both be used together without problems.

 

I sincerely hope that I am misunderstanding this part.

 

Since you didn't elaborate on what your understanding was, i'm not sure I can help you there. If your referring to the windows firewall operating side by side with outpost, you are correct.

Though I did not do it intentionally, I did have them both running concurrently on both a windows XP and 7 machine for a good period of time and it presented no issues at all. You could also just shut down the Outpost firewall and just run the HIPS, but that was not the case in my examples. Both outpost and Windows were up and fully functional. But im not sure that would work with all third party firewalls. I have seen some pretty catastrophic failures with similar setups, but Outpost has always been surprisingly friendly with other security programs, in addition to being extremely effective.

 

Yes, that's what I thought. Running two deep security software which do the same thing is always been suggested as a bad idea. IMO even if there's no apparent issues we don't know what's going on behind the scene. Besides, stacking up 2 software firewalls is not much useful anyway since 3rd party firewalls are basically also use the same technology Windows' own firewall uses (correct me if I'm wrong on that).

 

@GrafZeppelin - thanks for that. I did search the forum, but must've been off my game. (And then I kinda fell off the net for a bit, so apologies for the late thanks.)

@Cabville - I've played the HIPS game for years and am tired of having to answer questions to less-technical users about "should I allow or deny this prompt" and then fix things up later when a program like the Avast updater or print driver only gets half installed because it was terminated by a well-trained (and well-meaning) "deny access to all" user. For Win7 PCs I'm now advocating to others that the Win7 firewall is good enough (having read many arguments), but I really didn't know if Vista was strong enough given how many things about Vista were somewhat premature or poorly designed/implemented and then "fixed" (or improved) for Win7.

I suppose another solution is to upgrade the laptop to Win7 or 8.1.

 

Well, the general rule of thumb is if you think Vista is a failure then you will also have to apply that impression to Windows 8, Windows 10, Windows 12, Windows 14 and so on.

On-topically on-topic, if I'm not being mistaken Vista, 7 and 8 use the same firewall. They improved the firewall feature in Vista and that has become the standard for the built-in firewall in all modern Windows OSes.