Onward And Downward

I settled on Sygate Personal Firewall after a couple days of testing it and Zone Alarm. Both packages offer a free version for home use with some features disabled.

While more 'geeky,' Sygate seemed to agree with my system better than the Zonelabs offering. Zone Alarm started popping up vector errors during Internet browsing after a couple hours of use, and the only way to get back to a functioning system was a hard reset using the PC power switch. I've heard this is bad for the computer, and I found many instances of this problem in the Zonelabs forums. A review of Event Viewer showed about 50 VSMON.DLL errors, so I uninstalled the software.

The Sygate package installed effortlessly and produced one shutdown error on reboot. After that it was smooth sailing, and it seems to work well. There's more to setting up Sygate's firewall software, and support will cost you a bundle. But, us geeks don't use technical support that often, anyhow. A program popup lets you know a process is trying to access the Internet or your network, and you are given to choice to allow the connection or have the program ask if the connection should be allowed. When a blocked program tried to access the Internet, a popup appeared saying it had been blocked and gave the choice to disable the warning. To me, this means the software is doing its job, so I think I'll stick with it.