Best Free Low-Resource Firewalls?

Must be your system.
Definantly not resource heavy here.

 

I don't suppose thegreatoutlaw is looking for an answer anymore... this thread is several months old.

 

Task manager Mem Usage numbers mean almost nothing, unless they are huge. A firewall that shows 15 MB in that column might reduce available memory by 40 MB on the performance tab. It is also necessary to look at CPU Time, not only for the firewall services, but for System and other services. It appears that the work done by firewall drivers is picked up by System. For reasons that I don't totally understand, several of the more advanced HIPS firewalls cause the touchpad driver on my notebook to run up lots of CPU Time, somewhat mitigated if the touchpad service is give trusted status. Finally some security apps will cause a noticeable slowdown on certain systems.

 

Correct.
But it is still not heavy on my system.
Light on memory, low cpu, no noticeable slowdown.

 

OA does feel light and i haven't noticed any slowdowns in browsing. However, i would say that judging from CPU Time, the CPu usage is average to high. Comodo eats less CPU Time, but tends to feel heavier. I would call PC Tools firewall low CPU eater and Kerio 2 ultra low.

 

You can use the inbuilt Vista Firewall for 2 way. You can do it manually, or use a small program that opens it up for you for 2 way. That's the way I do it, and its so light on my system, no heavy resource hungry applications running.