Free Vista Sunday, enable Vista’s two-way firewall with Vista Firewall Control
Microsoft ships Vista with a better firewall than previous versions of Vista but it’s configuration isn’t so great right out of the box and unless you want to set up rules manually, yourself, it’s just better to run a third party firewall. But that can pose entirely new problems.
It seems that many third party solutions don’t play nice with Vista in one or more ways. Some can prevent Vista from retrieving updates, others can freeze the operating system seemingly at random and others just plain don’t work at all.
That leaves running the Vista firewall itself. Running the firewall that’s built in to the operating system is not something I usually recommend unless you have Mac OSX or Linux which aren’t very prone to any kind of attack.
Enabling the two way firewall of Vista isn’t easy and must be configured manually in many cases. I don’t like doing much of anything manually hence my absolute aversion to the command line unless it is the only option.
To that end, Vista Firewall Control will solve most of your problems and is like running a third party firewall, programs will request access and you can allow it, block it or set a rule, easily. Basically it provides an easier to use GUI configuration for Vista’s own firewall and it won’t interfere with the general operation of the system because it’s native.
I’m not saying Vista Firewall Control is as good as running a third party firewall, it’s not really but it will have to do until the likes of ZoneLabs, Comodo and PCTools can sort out the issues that each of their firewalls have on Vista.
ZoneAlarm tends to just not work on Vista and tosses up IRQ errors of all things, Comodo prevents Vista from retrieving updates and PCTools thinks freezing Vista at random is a good idea.
However, running Vista firewall control is better because it tells you what Vista’s firewall is doing and that’s better than letting the thing manage itself.
Vista Firewall Control also made the 30 free utilities for Vista article. It is available in a “basic” free version as well as several paid versions.
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