Free Security Software for Vista
By Jonathan Schlaffer
Vista is supposedly the most secure operating system to ever to come out of Redmond. Maybe it is, but that doesn’t mean any PC that has Vista installed should connect to any kind of network without anti-virus, anti-spyware and firewalls installed. It is not necessary to pay through the nose or give an arm and a leg for protection either.
Most home users (and non-profit organizations) can get their protection at no charge. However, businesses and enterprise level corporations must seek out paid alternatives and I will mention all of them later.
Home users have many robust choices when it comes to free protection on Vista. I am only going to list those that run on Vista; there are many many more freeware choices when it comes to XP. This is NOT in order of preference.
The first one is AVG Free Edition, by far and large the best well known free anti-virus application on the market, it uses little system resources and will offer adequate protection for most but it is not the best.
Then there is Avast Home Edition which uses slightly more resources than AVG does but it has better scanning engine and active protection. Currently, these are the only two free anti-virus applications that I know to be working on Vista. Anti-virus protection is very necessary but is not the only thing you need to protect your PC. With that, you should always install several anti-spyware applications. You can install more than one anti-spyware application because they do not conflict with each other but NEVER install more than one anti-virus application.
That being said, many of the same anti-spyware protection offered on XP is also available for and runs on Vista. Starting with Spybot Search and Destory which is probably the best known free anti-spyware application on the market and should be the first one you install.
 Windows Defender is included with Vista (but is optional for XP) so it is not necessary to install that one. Adaware SE Personal is my third choice for spyware detection. Of these applications Spybot and Adaware are probably the most effective.
Here lies the one and only problem with security applications on Vista, most third party firewalls won’t work. The mainstream free ones such as ZoneAlarm and the Comodo Firewall are not yet working on Vista and it remains to be seen when they will be.
I would not rely on the Vista firewall to keep a computer fully protected as it only offers inbound protection but like the firewall in XP, offers no outbound protection by default, it can be enabled but it is not the easiest thing to configure.
There is one freeware firewall that runs under Vista, PCTools Firewall Plus is freeware and offers more protection than the built-in firewall.
The only other third party firewall protection that is working are those that are provided in the Norton and McAfee Security Suites but these only come in paid versions.
If you truly want and desire a better software firewall in Vista then my choice would be the McAfee Security Center, Comcast Users can obtain this for free by downloading it through their Comcast account. Other ISPs may offer similar services so check with your ISP before you run out and purchase one of them in a store.
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March 14th, 2007
You mention that Vistas firewall can block outbound direction as well “offers no outbound protection by default, it can be enabled “. How do you configure this?
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March 14th, 2007
Sure, though I still recommend the use of the PC Tools firewall if you have no other protection. To enable outbound protection for the Vista firewall you will have to set the rules by using the Security Group Applet. To start it type wf.msc in the search box and hit Enter. You will see advanced firewall settings in the dialog box, scroll down to where it says Firewall Rules and Outbound Rules, you can allow or deny programs outbound access here. This does little to protect you from Trojans, Spyware or Viruses that “phone home”. Almost all other third party firewalls will scan for malicious behavior and block it (Or will ask you to allow or deny), the Windows firewall does not do this.
March 18th, 2007
Not sure that I agree with the idea of running Spybot and AdAware… from my experience with a number of various PCs and configs, these two drain a lot of system resources. The best soloution will offer better protection than one or two scanners while not impacting on the machine’s performance… to the point that there’s a nice balance that we can live with each day. I’m still searching for this solution by the way!
March 18th, 2007
I assume you mean while they are running. You won’t get an argument from me on that but it’s only while they are running. As neither offer true active protection (though Spybot does have the immunize function (Tea Timer is useless) and only the paid version of Adaware offers active protection.
The reason different scanners detect different things are for several reasons, one is different update cycles and the other is companies may differ on what they consider to by spyware, malware or adware.
What you are looking for doesn’t exist (at least for Vista) but I would have suggested the Safety and Security Center, http://daol.aol.com/safetycenter but it is not yet compatible with Vista.
As for the system resources, I use nothing but (AMD and Intel) dual core processors (1.6GHz and up) on systems with 1.5GB+ of memory, large hard drives, powerful graphics cards and so on, so I don’t really notice if a program impacts performance or not as I rarely use more than 40% of any systems resources.
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