Trojan Protection with NOD32

Not my experience at all, and I have installed a hell of a lot of them, 100's on customers PC's.

Cheers

 

They invariably do, it is just a question of how much. There is no way around this. You probably won't notice it, but no one can honestly say "It makes literally 0% difference!"

Firewall software is also a great way to make your system crash, and kill off countless hours of idle time.

Not that you shouldn't run it...

 

Stephanos G,

Whether or not a firewall reduces the speed of your internet depends on where your throughput bottleneck redsides.

If you have a very fast connection and a rather slow PC, the bootleneck of handling packets may reside on your PC. In that case, yes, you may experience reduced speed. If you have a slow connection and a very fast PC, there's not way you will see it. It general, you really shouldn't see an impact of the firewall on connection speed. It's only a traffic monitor at a packet level, there is no analysis beyond that. For example, when I turn off my copy of Outpost, I do not see a sudden jump in responsivenes. Basically, I see no impact. I would expect that is true for the vast majority of cases.

Blue

 

What about hardware firewalls?

 

Firecat,

Same answer as I gave above. Hardware firewalls are spec'ed with a typical maximum throughput. As long as this is well above the max download speed of you internet connnection, you'll be fine. For example, I have a 4 Mbps max download speed. My router, a Zyxel Zywall 10W has a stated max throughput of 25 Mbps. As with many vendor specs, it's probably somewhat optimistic for general use, so lets assume it is ~ 20 Mbps. With a 4 Mbps line being processed by a device that can handle 20 Mbps, that device shouldn't be a bottleneck.

If it were an older device, and had a max throughput in the area of 4 Mpbs, then yes, you would see an impact.

nameless' comment also applies. For anything added to the communications path, you will see some incremental slowing, the question is whether or not it is perceptible to the user.

Blue

 

Thanks Blue

 

A pretty good explanation, but they always slow it down somewhat, even with a slow connection and a fast PC. You may not notice it, but it's happening. OK, so maybe I'm just being pedantic, but... I guess I'm anal about details like that.

They also like to use CPU time. (This is where people look at how much CPU time their firewall's EXE has used, not realizing that the CPU time is also being used by the driver, which won't show up that way.)

 

A good hardware firewall is indispensable for most systems, I think. Some of them are crap just like everything else, but a good one will be 5,000% better than any software firewall available--except that it won't help much with outbound connections.

 

Unfortunately i tried today the Zone alarm firewall. Has slowed too much my internet speed. Finally i decides to uninstall it. Now my internet is flying again. I prefer NOD32 and CounterSpy. I never liked the firewalls. Same problems i had before with Norton internet security. Thanks anyway

 

Maybe you should give Look N Stop or some other firewalls a try.

 

Paul,

I agree with you, this thread did go off topic a bit, sorry about that.

Regards,

Jag