Can anyone recommend a free firewall for Vista?

[beanbag]

OK, after all the troubles and anguish, I've finally got myself a copy of Ultimate and it works great (even on my lowly Athlon XP 3200+. The thing is, everything apart from my trusty Sygate firewall installed great which leaves me with a gaping security hole and no idea what to plug it with.

Can anyone recommend a good free firewall that is certified for use in Vista?

Ta!

BB

[ThePassenger]

Have ZoneAlarm got a vista version out?

To be honest if you're hiding behind a router you could probably get away with using Vista's built-in one (I mean XP-SP2's got one... makes sense Vista would) at least as a temporary measure until something more robust is released.

[LukeBird]

No, no Zone Alarm Vista support yet...
It's the support that is a big push away from Vista for me...

[RobDickinson]

Doesnt vista have a firewall?

You already behind a Nat'd router with possibly a built in firewall?

[spyke]

Yeah, Vista Ultimate (not sure about the other versions) definitely has one built-in, but you may need to enable it.

From hazy memory, go to Start/Network then something like Network and Sharing Centre. From there, you should find a link to Windows Firewall, which will probably be off.

[beanbag]

Yup, Vista (all versions), have a built in inbound and outbound firewall built into it which is ok, but it's very basic.

I also have a hardware firewall on my router which of course is the safest option but I also keep certain ports open so I can use uTorrent from work with the new amazing WebUI, plus I also have other services available which I like to keep as secure as possible. Basically I limit all IP's apart from my work one.

Anyhow, I've only managed to find one reasonable looking Vista firewall which is PC Tools Firewall, but I've seen some of their stuff before and it looks like it came off the cover CD from Computer Active amateur magazine (maybe I'm totally wrong).

Anyone used this before?

[smithsi]

Zone Alarm now have a public beta which is open to all. So you could try that, although it is beta software.

I'm going to install ZA on Vista this evening and see how I get on

This will be after I have re-installed Vista on a different hard disk, because I accidentally trashed some of my girlfriends files which I didn't know were important and not backed up on my PC, and need to see if I can recover the files from a disk that I ran fdisk on!!

Wish me luck

PS Anyone recommend any good data recovery software