I used to use Zone Alarm until I upgraded to XP, when my resident computer guru advised me that it wouldn’t be necessary to install ZA if I enabled XP’s built-in firewall.

I’m interested to see so many of you are still using a separate firewall with XP. Is there a problem with XP’s built-in firewall? It seems to work OK for me.

I'm using XP and ZA (free version) with the XP f/wall disabled. No problems once you're setup.

If you had a house where the press had a new report every week saying how, yet another, trick had been found to open the front door lock without a key, would you fit additional one built by the same people?

Gibson Research:

The Windows XP built-in firewall:

Just so you know, WinXP's built-in firewall does not attempt to manage or restrict outbound connections at all. It appears to be a useful firewall for hiding the machine from the Internet (it has "stealth mode" unsolicited packet handling), but you will still need to use a good third-party personal firewall if you wish to manage and control outbound connections from your system."

As ORAC pointed out, XP's firewall does not allow you to control any outbound connections. This is important as many of the viruses and other malware, once on your computer, will either start emailing and/or attacking other computers, or try to download more software to yours. If more people had had a proper firewall for the last couple of years, most of the viruses which were in the news wouldn't have spread as far or caused as much trouble.

goates

I use McAfee, have for many years, cannot fault it. :ok:

The automatic updates work excellently. :ok:

I use Kaspersky Anti Virus. When I first installed it, it found two (inactive) viruses that had sat on my PC for two years and had never been found by Norton Antivirus.

This site might give you further food for thought:

http://www.software-antivirus.com/index.html