Considering going back to Zonealarm - would appreciate your comments

Years back and up to the demise of my Vista machine I always used ZoneAlarm as a firewall product. The thing I liked about it most was that you could set it to prompt you every time a new program or function wanted to access the Internet or use another process. It was then up to you to decide whether this should be allowed or denied.

Windows Firewall is supposed to be good and it's also supposed to warn you when a new app is blocked. I have never seen any notification so I'm guessing that Windows is never blocking anything new on my machine, even though I've loaded many programs on top of the OS. Which means MS is making the decisions for me and allowing everything.

What are your thoughts about the effectiveness of ZoneAlarm compared to the Windows Firewall?

Stay away from it

Thanks for the reply but you don't say why you think ZoneAlarm is not good.

Windows Firewall will forbid outbound connections of those programs thatare in the database as known baddies.

If they're known baddies then the probability is that I wouldn't have them installed anyway. But it's more than that, it's about control and privacy for me, and there are a number of 'goody' programs that don't need to have access to the network that I want to easily disable, which is what ZA allows. Editing Windows Firewall rules is not the easiest thing to do.

Thanks for your input.

Sandbox is an added complication I don't need.

Glasswire isn't free and I don't fully trust it - no evidence but just a gut feeling based on its history

I'm familiar with tweaking the Win Firewall but it's not very straight forward and never flags up new programs or processes that require access to the network - it just relies on MS saying it's OK.

That said I've been trying Zonealarm with Win10 and while the experience is good on my ancient laptop - more than 12 years old and running 1809 - if doesn't work smoothly on my newer workstation (1803) which is what I really want it for. It's slow to boot and then performance varies.

So for now I'm staying with the in built Windows firewall.

Besides having a software firewall, I would imagine that your router has built in firewall as well which should be all you need.

The real purpose of using a software firewall is to prevent someone like a guest using their infected laptop in your home and blocking it from spreading to other computers inside your network. Just don’t allow strangers to bring untrusted devices into your network.

Windows Firewall is fine. If you need to go more advanced than that, try looking into PFSense.

If you’re not sharing multiple computers with untrusted computers, your fine just using a router and the Windows Firewall. All routers now have great firewall protection built into them to protect your overall network.

I used ZoneAlarm for several years myself but stopped using it when Windows 10 was released. I've found Windows does a perfectly good job of taking care of things. Programs that want to access the internet usually want to do so to update. If you don't want them doing that you can either disable autoupdate in the program settings (some won't even update automatically unless you have the paid version) or set the update service to manual (so you can updater yourself when you want to).

Sam Vimes said:

Windows Firewall is supposed to be good and it's also supposed to warn you when a new app is blocked. I have never seen any notification so I'm guessing that Windows is never blocking anything new on my machine, even though I've loaded many programs on top of the OS.

Windows Firewall will block and warn you about incoming connections - by default all outgoing connections are allowed.

I use Windows Firewall Control which is a front-end to Windows Firewall. It will prompt you and add outgoing rules as well for new programs when they try to connect to internet - you can then allow or block them. The rules it generates are added to Windows firewall.

Windows Firewall will block and warn you about incoming connections

I've never ever seen a warning from Windows Firewall, which could be construed as good, but I know for a fact that some of my other machines on the network never cause a warning when they try and connect to each other. Whereas Zonelarm does give a warning and option to allow or deny.

That said for now I'm sticking with Windows Firewall.

I never had a virus on my computer but, as I have a relative high speed internet, I have, every day, many outside attempts of invasion.
I still use an old free version of ZoneAlarm (9.2.106) firewall on my win 7 computer. Unfortunately it doesn't work on Win 10.

On win 10 I use the latest free version. It daily updates a safe program data base. I set it to manual so I can decide witch program is allowed to access the internet.
What I don't like on it:
- Has a different interface.
- Also has a kind of malware detector (that I disabled)
- The GUI window is small and you can't expand,