Protect Ur PCs

Just formatted my laptop for quite a time ago. Since then, I've been using Sygate Personal Firewall (SPF) I've found freely shared on the Internet (of coz, it's a freeware after all).

What I didn't realize was that Sygate had stopped production of SPF since one-two years ago when Symantec made an acquisition for the company and thus having SPF integrated into another kind of paid-version Norton Internet Security.

I'm not really the kind of person who will actually pay for these things, I'd rather use a freeware firewall. Yet, freeware firewall now seems hard to be found. Not that it's hard, but consumers eventually only get something like a trial or downgraded version for these freewares. What a heck

Lucky me though, I found this. I've googled for the reviews, and they weren't bad. So here's a catchup for this Comodo Personal Firewall :

- FoC for a PRO version, meaning that the capabilities are limitless, unlike other free firewalls where they took out some of the tools and made it freeware.

- Quite easy to setup. Here's the thing. This software is a little bit complicated for first-time users, especially non-technical Internet people.

The first time I installed it, I stood for quite a time understanding why the firewall is actually blocking every In and Out even though I've already set some of the configuration.

Seems to me that it has a popup system which I somehow missed. So I looked into the details of the software. Lucky me, there's a button "Scan for known applications" which made the complexity of the program became a little easy for me. You just have to press the button and follow whatever instructed by the program.

- Analyzer. Ok, it's not that they provide us with an analyzer, but they aren't quite supportive in analyzing new threats. Rather than they looking into the new threats themselves, they provided a system for us to actually send any suspicious files which could be a threat to them.

In a point of view, it looks good, but I just think that not everyone will eventually like this idea. Lazy users like me usually relies on the firewall itself to detect for threats, not seemingly to suspect this and that to be a threat. We aren't George W. Bush for God's sake.huhu.

Still, lucky us their databases is good, if not perfect, because they provide a thorough detail in whatever application launch. For instance :

I opened up iexplore.exe, the executable file for Internet Explorer. A popup will come out saying something that iexplore.exe is a safe program, but it might be opened from client.exe which is a threat.

Simply to say, they provide some advice for us to actually keep on aware whether the file we are opening is safe or not. Still, this would be jolly good for experienced users, not n00bies. Experienced users might Ctrl+Alt+Del and look for all the applications mention if they are activated, while n00bies would surely ignore it and just press Ok~

- Popup. I mentioned before about the popup system they used. Yep, it is good, something like the ZoneAlarm Free Edition which I've used before (before changing to SPF because ZoneAlarm seems to be blocking some of the ports I've used for my torrent downloaders, and I can't seem to find the configuration to unblock the ports, must be because it is a Free Edition). Yet, there seems to be some bug in here. Everytime a popup appears, there's a checkbox to make the firewall remembers the configuration and not to appear anymore.

Somehow when I reboot my system, the remembered seems to be lost and we need to reconfigure it again. Imagine having 9 or 10 applications remembered and you lost them all, need to reconfigure it. Not something we would have wanted for a PRO version, but what to do, it's FoC after all. Never to worry anyway, the popup system is a paged system, meaning that if I have to reconfigure 10 applications, there would be only one popup, but you will have to change the pages of the popup. This is rather good to be compared with having 10 popup coming out of the screen simultaneously.

That's my review of this thing. After this I might even use their anti-Malware system if they're good enough. Hoping that they released a FoC PRO anti-Virus hahaha. 4/5 from me for them~