I was not going to downgrade to Vista because XP is just fine and runs softice. However, I bought a cheap laptop and it came loaded with Vista and (yuck) a symantec firewall. I absolutely hate Symantec and I'm looking for a good firewall and virus checker that will run on vista.

I have been using the free Sygate firewall on XP very successfully, but Symantec bought them out and essentially discontinued a very good, free product. That's only part of the reason I hate those Neanderthals. I can't stand the way they stick their nose into everything you do. Apparently the winsock was changed in Vista (way to go Bill) and Sygate can't live with it.

Also, I'd like to find a virus checker with no bells and whistles. I don't want a virus monitor. Kaspersky used to work really well for me but they have gotten really greedy, demanding a new licence every year. The Russians sure took to capitalism pretty quick.

BTW...is there any word on debugging with Vista? Does Olly work on it?

Only used for XP, but I used to use Zone Alarm Pro 7.x, but after some update it developed a terrible memory leak. Leave the computer on for several hours and the system slowed to a crawl and you had to restart ZA to clear the memory consumption. Lots of complaints about the high memory usage on the net. I did some reversing to figure out exactly what was causing it, but finally gave up on it after being happy with it for several years. The new ZA is probably better, it couldn't be much worse.

I tried a couple of free firewalls and finally settled on Comodo. I don't use its virus scan feature because I use Mcafee Enterprise, though only for on-demand scanning. Comodo seems pretty good, at least there's no memory leaks. Night and day in that respect between it and ZA.

Try clamwin for a scanner. It's not an active monitor.
I still use Zone Alarm. I tried Comodo but it was too intensive.
Not that it's a bad thing, just too much for my liking.
And I dont have the Zone Alarm problems that a lot of people have.
I hear some bitching at work about it chewing up memory and I think
it's a conflict with some other active av or firewall that might be running.

Then again, I work in a place where people have 15 progs running on the tool bar
and they wonder why their box is slow.

Woodmann

I was put off ZA a long time ago when they shut my entire internet connection down till I logged in with them to verify the shutdown. That seemed overly intrusive and I lost interest.

I have heard of Comodo as well as the PCTools firewall and Fort Knox. The latter is rumoured to be built on a template of Sygate.

Thanks for input K.

Holy mackerel, the boss.

I'll look into clamwin but further research has revealed something interesting. AVG is offering a free antivirus because they feel no one should be without one. That's either really good spin or we finally have a product made with heart.

thanks for tip W.

Well............

I use AVG and Avira.
I use Clamwin as a backup.

Not to mention Combofix and Malwarebytes when needed.

I am curious about the problems that a lot of people have with ZA.
Since I have never had them, I wonder why others do.

I suppose you could use Comodo and shut off all the features you dont want.

Wood

There was some mention of memory leak in ZA when p2p or emule or whatever was used, but that certainly wasn't my case. It just started happening at some point. The only things that would have changed for me is a Mcafee dat file or Windows xp3 security update.

I used Sysinternals VMMap to take a snapshot of mem usage in ZA, then after several minutes another snapshot. There was one particular mem region that kept increasing in size, consuming resources, continually over time.

Then I used TopToBottomNt to view that mem region, it mostly looked like text strings of suspect/spy/mal sites. I never dug into it deeper to see what *really* was being allocated/leaked. I'd need to remove Mcafee then reinstall ZA to do any accurate testing of the problem, as well as possibly enabling pool tagging.

I just mention those 2 tools, especially VMMap, if others want to check ZA for memory leakage that they may not realize they have.

Since no one mentioned this very good option for a free antivirus "without many bells and whistles", I'm gonna give it to you even though it's a bit late:

Microsoft Security Essentials:
http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/

For some reason that page does not work properly in Internet Explorer on some computers (WTF?!?), but just use Firefox and it's fine.

Never too late, Delta, thanks for link.

I was actually thinking about an AV with nothing running in the background but I guess modern AV's try to idiot-proof their products. I have free AVG running, with a right-click menu that allows scans of specific directories or files. Still, it uses a service and if you turn it off, it wont work.

I'll give MSE a shot...thanks again.

BTW...I just passed my 500th post, don't I get a cake or something??

Then again, I just noticed you have over 3000 posts, making me somewhat of a lightweight. Wherever did I get all the bs required to make 500 posts?

Well.........if you were JMI I would say you got most of them by bitching at people .

No cake for 500. My gratitude is all I can offer.

Thanks, Woodmann

You'll have JMI feeling like he's the Rodney Dangerfield of the reversing scene. Thankfully I have never incurred JMI's wrath, no doubt because he felt sorry for me. Maybe I can get a cake from him.

Duh! "I just can't get any respect" Now you can call me "Rodney Dangerfield "

Regards,