so many firewalls....

i was a long time user of outpost and have since switched my pc's to vista so i cant continue till they release the vista version... anyway i have now tried kis, and look n stop. the only one i was poss interested in trying was nis 2007 but after all the past years with norton and how awful i thought the programs were and how much usage and blot was there i am still debating. even though it seems to be getting rave reviews now everywhere. comodo sounds to be a great choice as well but again not vista ready yet.

one of the things about outpost recently is how bloated it was starting to feel. on my xp machine i was seeing upwards of 35+mb of usage and sometimes closer to even 39... a bit much imo for just the firewall...

i love how lite lns is but im not so sure of its overall protection yet. it seems to do reasonably well but didnt pass certain tests i tried and its still beta im testing for vista.

i guess what i want is a all around lite firewall that will give me as much protection as outpost seemed to. it just seemed to be a better overall firewall than lns is. i need vista comp though.. i have been hesitant to try a security suite since the last few i have tried have been awful.. they usually will have either a great av or a great firewall but not both. last time i tried kis on xp was the beginning of last year and i thought the firewall kinda sucked. it seems the new suite is better now though.


for av ive used nod32 since version 1 and never looked back but even nod seems to be getting a bit more hungry lately i think i have seen over 20 mb which im not used to seeing from nod..

any thoughts on the suites?? or what would you recc i look to now. thanks

 

I wouldn't say it (AH) sucks. You have to look at it in a wider perspective: AH is a part of the suit, with great av and above all the very effective PDM module. Combined they provide outstanding protection. I've got KIS running on my comp now, using only a total of ~11,5mb right now, not sure how much cpu, but I can hardly tell it's running. No slowdowns whatsoever.

 

If I have understood your question, you are looking for a firewall

- light
- windows-vista compatible
- with good performance in inbound and outbound direction

so, very few firewalls answer to such requirement.
Jetico is one of this.
The only Vista compatibility just shrinks the field very much, in fact, this is the list of firewalls with it:
http://www.matousec.com/projects/windows-personal-firewall-analysis/links.php#personal-firewalls
see if they have this icon:
http://www.matousec.com/pict/ico/Vista_y-18x18.gif

Another option you have is to use a not excellent firewall (or also very poor) but with a light resource HIPS software.
A free example:
PC Tools Firewall Plus + System Safety Monitor

Good luck

 

This is exactly why KIS is a great option IMO (although i find the fw - anti hacker - to be quite excellent) Anti hacker + proactive defense module is a strong combination, it's vista compatible, light on resources and the pdm is easy enough to use. Of course, it's not free.

 

I couldn't agree more with danieleb (above). My wife now uses KIS on her WinXP PC (with only 256MB RAM). It works very effectively and without impacting performance (to where it's noticeable)! ...Actually, I'm quite impressed.

 

I had to stop using it due to it's bloat even with plugins turned off it was purchased for
"my pc". I will return to it when I upgrade also hopefully they will rein in on some of that memory useage.

 

Actually I think KIS runs pretty heavy, and it's due to the firewall components. I then ran ZAISS on the same PC and it ran much lighter. In fact the ONLY con IMO of KIS is how heavy the firewall runs, otherwise it's a great product.

Of course if you have a Vista compatible PC I'm sure it's equipped to handle this drain and take it in stride, so I'd go with it. The PC I was using was a 2.2 GHz P4 w/ 512 MB of RAM.

 

Something isn't right... KIS is running without any noticeable performance impact on my wife's 10-year old Gateway PC (a 1GHz P3 with 256MB RAM)!!!

 

That's what I thought too, because it had a noticable effect on the performance (for the worse). "Something" certainly wasn't right, but I can't imagine what that might have been. It actually steered me away from KIS altogether, now I only use the AV.

Everybody claims it's a great firewall and light on resources, ect... But so far every time I have installed it on a PC it's had a noticable suckage of resources. Not just once, on a couple different ones, which lead me to believe it was the product itself. All I have to go on are my own personal experiences, and they haven't been good. If it works fine for everybody else, that's great... must be nice!