Personally, for free firewalls, I like sygate personal.  Its free and does the job...  Although ZoneAlarm is a good product, I recall a couple years back, there was a program that would disable ZoneAlarm and enable access to your computer.. .  I know this cause Idownloaded it...  It's probably been fixed since then, but I thought I would bring it to your attention.. 

Your router is probably the best firewall you  get.

wakegirl

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@Jerry Park wrote:

I depend on my router's NAT and checking any downloaded material before opening for protection.

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I second that.

Another vote for having a hardware-NAT / router.

I personnaly use an educational version of Microsoft's ISA server and that's what works best for me, but if I had only one machine and had to buy the software (and it ain't cheap...) I guess I would use something along the lines of ZoneAlarm as well...

Rick.

EDIT: but even then, it won't protect you from Spywares, because they get installed by user interaction, either accepting to install through an ActiveX control or you get them when installing another program. What it will protect you from however is worms such as Sasser or Blaster.

Message Edited by RichardLusignan on 05-14-2004 11:57 AM

True enough...I use Pest Patrol for spyware + Symantec AntiVirus Corporate 8.1 on my systems...

Tried Symantec AntiVirus Corporate 9 last week, it also protects against spyware, malware, adware in addition to AV duties, but it's incompatible with SP2_RC1, which the final release of SP2 will fix hopefully...and when it does, I'll uninstall Pest Patrol for one less running process.