firewall necessary?

[allen]

how necessary is a 3rd party firewall, as in using something other than windows firewall?

i was using the symantec client security antivirus and firewall combo, then realized it was sucking up too much memory resources.

so now i'm going with nod32, pretty happy with it so far, but just got the antivirus part, not their firewall suite thing...

do you really need a firewall other than windows xp's?

[jdhurst]

It depends.

If you are always behind a secured router, then probably not. I am sometimes using dial-up or a cellular modem, and then I need a firewall. I use Corporate Symantec and it is exceedingly low on resources.

Now to Symantec Retail. Norton Internet Security 2008 is actually very low on resources. I put in on one client machine so far and they don't even know it is running. By all means, use whatever you wish, but maybe you didn't set Symantec up properly.
... JDH

[Wiz]

I guess it depend what you want. The XP firewall cannot block outgoing traffic (just incoming). Also if you want more features you might have to find another firewall since the XP firewall is pretty simple and not a lot of options. If all you want to do is to block incoming traffic the XP firewall do a decent job though and in that case i don't see why you should use something else.

I been using XP for a long time and used the XP firewall since all i want to do is to block incoming traffic with a few excetions and allow all outgoing. Also i hate those firewalls that shows a popup every 10 seconds to ask if i want to allow something. As far as i know no one been able to hack my computer and i have not been infected by anything. Now i moved to Vista and the Vista firewall is a bit more advanced with the option to block outgoing traffic and create a bit more advanced rules set, but still i prefer to allow all outgoing so doesn't actually use all of the features and i don't want those popups asking if i want to allow programfiles to run and stuff like that.

So if the XP firewall do what you want i would stick with the XP firewall, but if you miss features like block outgoing traffic, application inspection and IDS/IPS features the XP firewall isn't a good option. I believe the XP firewall i good and safe doing what it's created to do which is to be a simple firewall to block incoming traffic. If you consider another firewall and like nod32 i guess it would be worth trying ESS since it's the same just with more features and use just slightly more memory then nod32.

Regarding Symantec client security and endpoint protection i found both to use a lot of memory and my computer where pretty slow as well. Now i use nod32 3.0 and the Vista firewall which i find to be pretty much faster compared to the Symantec products.

[Wiz]

Now to Symantec Retail. Norton Internet Security 2008 is actually very low on resources. I put in on one client machine so far and they don't even know it is running.
... JDH

I read somewhere that Symantec received a lot of complaints about the resource usage so they did a lot of work with the new versions to keep the resource use as low as possible. So if that is correct i'll guess there might be a noticeable difference between the 2006/2007 and 2008 products.

So i guess you are right and the 2008 products might be worth a try, but all the stuff i read about the earlier versions (2007) i wouldn't recommend those.

Just curious....is the Symantec Antivirus Corp. edition still a product that Symantec sell? Seems like they recommend everyone to buy the endpoint security instead and not sure if they still sell the corp. AV at all. I used Symantec AV Corp for a long time and think it's a pretty nice product, but i didn't like the endpoint security which seems to be the new software they try to sell instead.

[gator]

Just buy a cheap wired router with NAT and SPI, secure it with a password and you are good to go. I bought a wired router for $10 from newegg last week!

[flamenco]

Hi,
I have a variation on this question. I have an R61i with WinXP SP2. I wanted to use a different firewall, Comodo, and that installed fine. I thought I would shut off Windows Firewall, and I tried that, but upon reboot, it always starts up again.

On the Comodo forum I found that you can stop the Windows service that controls this, WMI, delete the repository folder, and reboot to rebuild the repository, because sometimes the new stuff doesn't take. But this did not work either.

I'm guessing that some of the piles of stuff that starts up with Windows is doing this. But I don't know.

Any ideas?
Thanks very much.

[Wiz]

Hi,
On the Comodo forum I found that you can stop the Windows service that controls this, WMI, delete the repository folder, and reboot to rebuild the repository, because sometimes the new stuff doesn't take. But this did not work either.

I guess this post is a bit off-topic since this has nothing to do with the post that started this thread, but if you set the firewall service to disabled it should not start again. If that doesn't help i think it would be better to start a new thread to discuss your problem.