I have been testing several versions of firewall, bitdefender, kaspersky, kerio, sunbelt, and some more. For now, I find that Bitdefender wins the gold medal, in my opinion. But still the antivirus within Bitdefender is not that powerful. I installed Avast 4 and tried to use only the firewall in bitdefender (disabling the antivirus of bitdefender) but conflicts happen between the two softwares when loading windows. Do you people, know the best firewall please?
I totally agree. If you're behind a router firewall, your software firewall could run for years without detecting any attempted intrusions - at least nothing that the basic XP firewall couldn't handle. Might be different if you were running a web server, or some other service, but then you wouldn't be using XP.
The answer is none. All software firewall apps have a tendency to cause more problems then they could ever possibly solve. Get yourself a good router/wireless access point combo with DMZ and hardware firewall. It will save you many headaches in the long run, not to mention not use up an computer resources from running all of that other grabage in the background.
What he said. Get yourself a router and hook *that* to the interwebs. Modern routers do all kinds of filtering and protection.
My personal experience for the best protection with the most trouble free performance is a hard wired router with WinXP firewall ON and AV firewall turned OFF.
Not just a router firewall but a whitelisting one.. for business put your Windoz machine behind a whitelisting router firewall and for everything else use a MAC...
You need a router, but having a software firewall running is a good idea too. Maybe your kid, wife or gf installs a "cute screensaver" or the like. Then it starts trying to send your info out... Blocking unknown and unexpected outgoing traffic is important too IMHO. I use Zone Alarm with no problems.