security
Kerio Personal Firewall
You can obtain Kerio from their website and it is free for home use.
In my humble opinion Kerio is the "best of breed" as far as software firewalls for Windows go. There are a couple of major selling points for me
- The firewall starts as a service immediately after the network is enabled, even before the login prompt is displayed.
- The default installation, while not utilising itself to the best advantage, does give solid all round protection to the novice user.
- You can get at the underlying advanced features to customise it to your liking without having to upgrade to a "Pro" version.
- The advanced rules are the closest I have seen in a free softare firewall to high end products like Checkpoint Firewall-1 and Watchguard hardware firewalls.
- I can measure no difference in the speed of my broadband connection with or without the firewall running.
How I setup Kerio on my Windows boxen is detailed in my How-To Get The Best Out Of Kerio Personal Firewall pages.
while I put the finishing touches to the How-To pages you can still download the Word doc and look at all the gory details. Kerio How-To.doc