Ashampoo Free Firewall & Avast

Hi,
I recently decided to remove my "old" Sygate firewall from my XP Home machine because it consumed too much CPU. I tried Rising free firewall, but it disturbed my home lan (other windows machine couldn't see my Pc all the time). I removed it and tried Ashampoo Free Firewall. It seemed to be ok at first, however I just realized today that Avast 6 was not updating its signatures any longer. After the Ashampoo F/W was removed, Avast worked again.

I just need a single feature : to block or authorize outgoing connections. Is there a recommendation ? Thanks.

 

Private Firewall which others will also recommend on here runs fine with avast 6.
Light on resources.

http://www.privacyware.com/personal_firewall.html

I would not use ZoneAlarm free as its heavy on resources and increases boot up speed lots.

 

Thanks a lot. I'll try it soon.

 

If you're not limiting your choice to freebies, and considering what you are looking for as an ideal candidate fw, Look 'n' Stop should be another excellent option to consider.

 

Thanks ! My requirements are pretty basic : no local network blocking of any kind ( I have a shared printer on this XP machine, plus several folders I want to share) and a learning mode for outgoing connections. Plus very little system load (it's a 6 years old PC...).

 

i would go with either ZA firewall or PCTOOLS which are light on resources and very easy to administrate

 

Hi,

I have tried yesterday Ghostwall and Personal Firewall. I had to uninstall both :
- Ghostwall cannot learn which application is allowed to establish outbound connections, you can only specify manually the authorized IP addresses AFAIK. Too bad, since it seemed very light
- Personal Firewall : the learn mode is implicit apparently, you don't get asked for confirmation when an application launches an outbound connection. And there are many added HIPS features I don't need at all.
- I didn't tried LnS (seems complicated and many people seem to report issues here on Wilders)

I have reverted to Sygate. Too bad for the CPU usage, but at least it works as expected.

I had very bad experience with ZA in the past, so next time I'll want to change F/W, I'll probably try PCTools.

Thanks all for your advices.

 

Try FortKnox Personal Firewall

it is a update to the old Sygate Firewall
me thinks?? or at least it looks like it
seems to work OK
although I believe the best one would be "Look n Stop"
but there is a learning curve to it

 

You should give Rising Firewall a spin.It worths.

 

I think I am using the last released version of Sygate PF.

Edited : sorry, I read too fast. I'll include FPF in my check list ! Thanks for your suggestion.

 

Thanks, but I already tried. It's rather technical to set up, but the bad part is that it messes up my home network. Sometimes the PC on which it is installed is not seen by the others, and locally the "net view" command gives an error message saying there is no list of servers available.

After I removed it, the network features started to work again.

 

Weird I haven't had problems with Rising firewall. Although last version I tried was 2008. Have you tried Sunbelt Firewall ?

 

How about Keiro Personal Firewall 2.1.5? No hips, just in/out bound control, the best I recall, and it's very light.
http://www.321download.com/LastFreeware/page7.html#Kerio

 

No, I don't think so. Currently I am using again the old Sygate...

 

Thanks, I didn't try it yet, but will add it to my list of potential candidates.

 

Change Ashampoo Firewall settings to learning mode. After this it will prompt a box when an application tries to connect the internet. Allow all Avast modules-then the update would work fine.

 

Kerio 2.1.5 is a golden oldie. It's great if you're running WinXP, but it won't work on Vista or Win7.

As to a replacement for Asham FW (burp), I recommend Private FW (supports 32-bit & 64-bit Windows 7 & Vista; Win XP 32-bit only).

 

I tried just that (all of it), but it didn't work. Even when I exited the application, all apps were supposed to launch connections, it wouldn't connect.

Only when I uninstalled the app it started to work again.

 

Since you just need the FW functions (from what I've read you don't want a HIPS) you can do the following: install Online Armor free and disable the HIPS (right click on the tray icon).
You'll be left with a very light Firewall, easy to use and configurable.

 

Thanks for pointing out this other solution. Actually, something funny has happened : I removed Sygate in the first place because of the high CPU at boot time. After I reinstalled it, the settings for authorized outbound connections and logs were all erased, and I had to authorize manually all legitimate connections. But the CPU high usage was gone ! So I guess it was the state of the database finally !

 

Sygate hasn't been updated for years. I wonder how safe it is to still use it.
I know that transmission protocols haven't changed, but how do we know that the product didn't suffer from some flaw(s) at the moment it stopped being devoloped?

 

That's definitely a point, but since I am already behind my router which has its own firewall, and run an up to date AV, I guess I am not too much at risk. I just needed something that manually authorizes outbound connections, for regular apps.