Testing my Licensed 3rd SW FW's

Hello Fellow FW users:

Been away fishing in other lakes.

I now have 2, paid 3rd party FW licenses. (not used at same time!!!)

The latest is Outpost Pro FireWall Pro 2009. I'm working with it for about a month now counting the trial period. Very interesting product.

The older one is OnLine Armor Paid (excluding the AV) which has been posted on here a lot including the learning thread.

Now I have zero interest in posting product OP vs product OA on this forum as they are always counter productive. We all know that.

What I would appreciate is if Stem or someone of similar expertise could tell me how to set up a system so it could have 2 windows xp sp3 os partitions. They would be identical in every respect except 1 partition would use OP Pro FW 2009 and the other would have the latest OA release. I would then flip between them to report results.


FWIW, there are a few posts about Sandboxie incompatibilities over at the Outpost forum as well. So it may very well be that Sandboxie is out of step with latest versions of these top ranked SW FW's. But as I don't need a Sandboxie I don't know from first hand experience.

 

Hi Escalader,

Creating a multi boot is straight forward, however, as far as I know, you will need a windows license for each installation.

There is info about multi boot here

You may change your mind considering the need to purchase a second XP license. Have you thought of using image software instead, then just restore the image needed (which is what I now do)


- Stem

 

Hi Stem et al:

Thanks for the reply's. I'll pass on the second xp license and try the image software route since I already have that SW up and running.

Would this the procedure you would use?

1) Image C as I do now with OP on it plus all my other stuff.

2) Uninstall OP clean up register etc and install OA then image that one.

Then depending on what I'm doing test wise restore from one or the other

What am I missing?

 

Hi Escalader,

As your main need to to use your PC for every day use, and you will have various programs installed that you would want to use, then yes, I would create an image for current install, then remove the firewall, (ensure completely removed) then install second firewall, then make image of that installation. You would also be wise to save any data to external storage that may need to be used on both setups.

If you where going to test other firewalls in the future, then it would be worth while after creating those images to format and create a base windows install with all drivers/updates, then before installing any 3rd party applications, to create an image of that base install that can then be used for the installation of other firewalls etc onto a clean image.


- Stem

 

Hi Stem:

Right, got it I think.

My user data is on the main hard drive in it's own partition.

All programs including the FW SW are in the c partition with the windows xp sp3 os.

I keep ALL archival images on an external hard drive. Any restoring of the partitions I do from that drive. (some years ago, ever since I defragged an image, I prefer to keep those separate)

The base windows application I will PM you about later when I finish these FW images.

Thanks again for your advice.

 

Or, to make it so much easier, you could try vmWare. You can then have 2 virtual machines running at same time if you want. You would install XP into vmWare, then clone it twice, once for each FW. Set each FW up, test play, all without having to reboot so many times. I bought vmWare a number of years ago. Best investment I ever made. They used to have trials. Dont' know anymore. Seems easier than rebooting into partitions.

Sul.