Windows XP Firewall

Is XP Firewall any good?

Im currently using Norton Firewall and I have never enabled XP Firewall because I dont know whether it is any good or not.

Should I run both Norton Firewall and XP Firewall or just stick with Norton?

Can any users of the XP firewall give me some feedback on it please?

Cheers

 

XP's firewall does not act as an "application gate" as do most other firewalls available - in other words, it looks only at incoming traffic and not outgoing traffic. Stick with Norton.

 

What brett said.

The XP firewall is like most of the other applets that M$ includes with the OS. It will work. But it will not be feature rich and you can do better with 3rd party apps.

And you don't gain anything from running more than one firewall (unless you own stock in a company that makes headache remedies).

 

Cheers for the replies.

I'll stick with Norton

 

Newt,

I've run both ZAP &, currently, Sygate alongside the XP ICF (one at a time!) with no problems, probably because ICF only blocks in. I happened to do this because I didn't get around to checking whether ICF was enabled for awhile after first intalling XP. Just left it that way. What finally made me check was the realization that ZAP was too quiet.

Regards - Charles

 

Charles - glad you were able to do it without a problem (headache).

But the only possible gain I could imagine is a hardware firewall in addition to a software firewall. That way if you happen to get a bug that disables AV & Firewall software, it can't touch the hardware piece so you will still have some protection.

But it certainly can make life more complicated and lots of new XP users really, big time do not need complication. And others of us just love to complicate and see if we can keep things running.

 

Just curious. What is an example/examples of outgoing data that needs firewall protection? ICS samples incoming data, and if the input doesn't meet standards there is no output.

 

It gives no application control - in other words, whatever is installed (be it a legitimate program or a trojan or some other form of malware) can establish a connection.

 

Thanks for your reply. With ICS and an effective AV program, what is vulnerable?

 

If you were to unwittingly install a password-stealing trojan and it were to manage to avoid detection by your AV then there would be nothing to prevent it from doing what password-stealing trojans do best A firewall with bi-direction filtering would, however, prevent any such "leak ". Similarly, ICF will not "block" phone-home spyware.

This thread (and the links) might interest you.

 

I understand. Thanks.