Re: The Dreaded Personal Firewall

In article <1138471976.347068.97980@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
brad_pitstain@yahoo.com says...
>
> Norton Internet Security 2006 claims to combine all these features.
> Anyone here have experience with NIS06? Does NIS06 do a good job of
> restricting outgoing connections and blocking spyware/malware?
>
> I have had bad experiences with these Norton suites in that the slow
> the computer and sometimes block network traffic for no apparent
> reason.
>

I personally would never use a Norton product after my past experiences
with them. As you mentioned, Norton tends to be fairly slow in terms of
responsiveness and it also seems to bog down the system, especially on
the older machines. And yes, I have seen that traffic blocking without
reason also. Norton stuff also tends to post a *massive* number of
entries to the registry, which I find a little disconcerting. I know
that many use NAV and love it, but to me Norton is the King Of Bloat.
So as such, I'd stay away from it.

If you want a 'suite', the 2 I liked best were the ZA Suite and the
BitDefender Suite. ZA had the stronger firewall, and BD had the
stronger AV, so depending on which you prefer, one might be more suited
than the other. But I think both of them are much more desirable than
Norton. Also most of the other 'suites' did not impress me much.

As someone else mentioned, there is no substitute for your brain though.
I don't really believe there is any one product that will prevent a user
from destroying his or her machine. A little training for the user
might go a long way.

-- 
Kerodo