I had been using Sygate Personal Firewall Pro for about 4 years, until recently I noted an application freely accessing the internet while I had blocked it in Sygate. I knew it was time to change since the firewall had not been updated ever since Sygate was acquired by Symantec in 2004. I first checked out Outpost Firewall Free but found it to be buggy with Avira installed and the alerts were confusing. I quickly moved on to Online Armor Free Edition. And I was pleasantly surprised.
The free edition of Online Armor has two components which are enabled, and which I suppose are the only ones necessary. The first component is the ‘Program Guard’ and the second is the firewall itself.
The ‘Program Guard’ is a HIPS (Host Intrusion Prevention System) component. HIPS works by confirming with the user, any actions that a program takes on their system, taking the controls from the software to the user, thereby preventing harmful actions by viruses or spyware. There are many HIPS available, some free like Comodo, but I found them very obtrusive and confusing. But the ‘Program Guard’ in Online Armor is the most unobtrusive of all. It works on a whitelist, containing a lot of genuine applications for which the user would never have a popup for. The user would not even know that the guard is active until an unknown software runs on the computer.
The firewall is great for the novice as well as the experienced user. It offers options for configuring advanced rules for each application installed on the computer as well as offers real time network monitoring, displaying applications which currently have connections to the internet, and offering to terminate individual connections with the click of the mouse. It has an option to automatically grant internet access to trusted applications sparing the user from many popups asking whether a process should access the internet or not. The memory footprint of the firewall and program guard comes to around 30mb, nothing compared to the level of security it offers.
The pro version of the firewall has secured the top position in tests carried out by third party testing facilities. The free version comes in at fourth place. The results can be seen on this page: Results and comments - www.matousec.com



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you mean using my own firewall settings??
