laptop firewall

i need a good firewall for my laptop. Its a 32 bit windows vista. I used pc tools firewall on it but it kept giving me crash's occasionally.

 

Are you looking for free or paid solution?

 

I would go with Online Armor free. After the first few days the alerts reduce in number and it's one of the most effective FW/HIPS around.

 

you can try private firewall

 

I currently use Privatefirewall (free) after having to remove Online Armor Premium (which I had used for a few years) due to its no longer playing nice with my system.

I think Online Armor (free or paid) is a great program (if it works for you) but am very happy with Privatefirewall as a replacement on my XP Pro SP3 setup.

 

Windows Firewall

You are on a laptop, so you are most likely also behind a router. If you got a modern router made by a well-known brand (examples: Linksys and Sitecom) that router will also include an hardware firewall.

The combination of the Windows Vista/7 Firewall + hardware firewall is rock solid and extremely light.

 

im looking for free version. 2 way protection. I would download any firewall to try it out and see if i like it but firewalls leave big messes behind when uninstalling. Im looking for something light i think thats the reason my computer crash's with pc tools firewall its to much for my laptop when doing activities that require the cpu, gpu to work harder

 

Many free solutions to deal with the fear pan Just find yourself a free imaging program - image - then test away - when done testing - restore your image

 

Have a look at this link. I hope you will find there some useful tests about lightweight for computer resources popular software firewalls during torrent, tv-streaming and web browsing activities.
PS. PCTools didn't use so many resources as you can see so it's a little bit surprise for me that you are saying this firewall was 'heavy' on your config.

HTH,

 

Definitely try Private Firewall...it leaves nothing, behind after an uninstall.

 

yes private firewall is the one im going to try. Thanks to all

 

Private firewall doesn't automatically switch profiles when you switch networks. That's been the deal breaker for me. If you use it on a desktop or on a laptop that doesn't need different settings for a trusted vs. untrusted (public) network, it seemed to be very nice and light when I tried it.