Does anyone here use Norton Firewall? If not, why not? Does anyone think it's very slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow..................................., or just me?
I tried norton for one day and it was awful. I wouldnt recomend it to my worst enemy. Also every single firewall comparison chart rate it as one of the least secure firealls on the market. and your right it is very resource hungry too. But then when i went to try and uninstall it. It totally messed up my system. I had to do a full system re-install to get back the way it was. The best two firewalls i have come accross are EZ Firewall and outpost pro. Mcafee isnt bad and im using that at the moment as i got it free from my ISP and free is all i can afford at the moment. P.S another firewall that totally messed up my machine to the point of needing a full system reistall was looknstop so i would personally advise to stay away from that one too. Hope this is some help
I tried Norton a while back and got rid of it after a day. It didn't damage my machine, but sure left a lot of garbage behind. I'm currently playing with the newest version of ZA free. Surprisingly, compared to earlier v5xxx, it doesn't seem to slow my computer down at all. Maybe, fingers crossed, they finally got it right.
Fellow Creatures, I use Norton Firewall 2004 on one of my machines and it works fine. I am behind a router firewall as well. AD Blocking is turned off. Most AD Block Firewalls I've used screwup webpages to bad. I've tweaked and said let ads on this site come through and still things are srewed up. Finally I just turn them off and all is o. k. including any ads of course. Sorry a little off topic, but I think some of the ad clean up slows systems down at times. By the way I think Zone Alarm has come a long with the ver 5, but it never should have had as many problems as it did, so I am a little concerned about the future of that one as new releases come out. I think they are going down the Norton path of bloat too. I know it sounds like double talk, but just so you'll know I am not crazy about Norton Firewall but it does not slow me down with AD Block off.
Given that one reason for ad blockers is to speed up web pages by not downloading ad graphics (the size of these can exceed that of all the other web page elements), it should take a pretty incompetent ad filter to still slow things down. There isn't too much that can go wrong with simple ad-filtering - but some sites are trying various tricks to bypass ad filters and avoiding these normally means having to disable Javascript (see The Register for an example, ads should still be visible until Javascript is blocked). However, if the firewall cannot cope (and this sort of thing is not a firewall's core function ultimately), then there are plenty of good (and free!) standalone web filters that can be used (Proxomitron being the most powerful).
