When it comes down to my personal computer [and other people's computers as well!], I crave a very secure and controllable environment. Everything needs to be at my fingertips, from what goes in and out through various ports — to changing my desktop background. Firewalls are the concern today!
I am thoroughly happy with Sunbelt’s Personal Firewall. It beats the Windows Firewall [hell, everything beats the windows firewall] in every aspect. I would even rank it higher than McAfee, BlackICE, and ZoneAlarm. I have control of so many aspects of the firewall such as web filtering, program activity, port monitoring, an extensive logging system, and even predefined behavior alerts. It is a bit complicated to fully use at first but well worth the time spent learning. And if you don’t feel like learning it is simple to set up and let it run in the background.
I do have one large problem. It is not caused by my firewall but does affect the firewall. My laptop, which I use majority of the time, came to me through a Laptop Program at my school. The school set everything up and then handed it to me, along with a belligerent contract stating that "I do not own this computer until graduation, at which time it will be ‘given’ to me. [Insert school name] has every right to take back said computer, make changes to said computer, and administrate said computer." Not in those exact words but close enough. Apparently there is a McAfee antivirus system running on this computer. I have no control over any parameters within the system, nor am I able to remove it because the school is administrator of it. My firewall constantly detects abnormal behavior from the antivirus program as well as intrusion attempts from it. It is very annoying having a malfunctioning antivirus program running on my computer while I try to do work with it. Thankfully I have had no major break-ins with this laptop. Albeit, could be because I’ve been running Sunbelt since I received this comp… makes ya wonder. I might as well just buy a new laptop! Should just stop messing around with this old <1.0 Ghz. IBM laptop probably made in 2003 with not even enough memory to run Adobe Photo and Firefox at the same time.
Anyways, enough ranting! Let’s get to it!
What security do you employ on something as valuable and essential as a personal computer?
I have:
Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall
McAfee Antivirus [malfunctioning and stagnant]
Mozilla Firefox [which carries plenty of web security]
Sysinternal’s ProcessXP [analyzes all background processes]
SpyBot SD [runs through temp files, cookies, etc to find ads and bots]