Rusty James said:
Please check this out and let me know if you think this would be a
good firewall and it is free:
http://www.techspot.com/downloads/2311-comodo-personal-firewall.html
So why are you asking about a firewall in a newsgroup for anti-virus
products? There are newsgroups for firewalls. Remember to post
*on*-topic.
I gave up on it. Firewalls with application rules will flood the user
when they start using it with prompts to permit an application to make a
network connection. Some reduce that by providing "smart" lists of
known apps (usually by matching with a hash signature to ensure the
program is what it says it is). Okay, that was expected, but Comodo
eventually forgets that you allowed an app to have network access and
begins asking you over and over each time you load the app. It isn't
that an update to the .exe occurred. Comodo just forgets. You may find
that deleting the app or network rule and then redefining it gets it
working again.
You may eventually find that your Internet access goes completely belly
up until you disable their firewall whereupon you can ping, telnet, web
browse, e-mail, and do everything again. Obviously there is not point
in wasting resources on a firewall that you always have to disable, so
you'll end up uninstalling it (and doing remnant file/dir and registry
cleanup) and then reinstall it which is a nuisance. Having Comodo
eventually die (after 3 fresh installs on freshly reimaged hosts) after
about 2 weeks eliminated me bothering with it anymore.
Some users thought their hard drives were dying because of the repeated
clicking noise from them when the drive should normally be quiescent.
To some, it was like a heartbeat where every 1.5 seconds they would hear
their drive spin faster. Turns out their logging is over zealous.
Users had to change their network rules from Block & Log to just Block
to eliminate the repetitive wear on their drives, even where there was
apparently nothing to log for that event.
One is that they really, r-e-a-l-l-y, REALLY want to their users to
promote their "free" product (i.e., they want unpaid associates to
advertise for them). Their need to advertise is so strong and pervasive
that it indicates a product-in-progress where its users are unaware they
are unpaid alpha testers and then the product goes eventually commercial
whereupon all those loyal users then have to buy it to continue using
it. They desparately seek users to "spread the word", but why bother
for a free product unless their intent is to engender awareness (i.e.,
free advertising) along with enlarging their prospective customerbase
and hope some of the suckers, er, prior customers decide to buy it when
it is no longer free. They are also desparately seeking OEMers to
bundle their products on pre-built boxes to further penetrate the
market. The product may turn out to remain free but it smacks too much
of an alpha product foisted on uninformed users to be used as unpaid
alpha testers that then get abandoned when the product goes commercial.
I have to wonder why a "free" product requires activation (i.e., shades
of functionality incorporated for an eventually commercial product so it
also gets tested by those unpaid and uninformed alpha testers).
Two, their firewall is the only remaining one of their "free" products
that doesn't require using their all-in-one loader program which results
in advertising their commercial products. In other words, it is adware
(for their own products). You get stuck with their Launchpad bannerware
for their other products. I was told but haven't bothered to verify
(since I don't bother with any of their products anymore) that they were
going to abandon their Launchpad. Hopefully that has become the case.
If not and it is the other way around, rolling their firewall into their
Launchpad loader would be an immediate cause for abandoning that
product.
Three, they won't let you search their forums until you register. It is
a nuisance that someone who wants to check out complaints by their users
has to register before they can search. Also, negative posts have a way
of disappearing prematurely from their forums. You are required to not
discuss or compare against other firewalls; else, those posts will
disappear. They can't take the heat of comparison, even if to request
enhancements or to contrast against alternatives from other sources.
Obviously they don't want their own forums to become negative
advertising of their products but they should be able to take some heat
and posts that report severe bugs or inappropriate behavior should be
tolerated. Again, this would only taint their forums for their "free"
products if there was intent to sell those products, but even other
already-commercial products tolerate far worse complaints than does
Comodo. Forget about searching for all posts by a particular author
since their search function refuses to hunt without something in the
"Search for" field (i.e., you cannot search alone by the author). It
won't let you search on "the" or other words it considers insignificant,
so forget looking for you own old posts. Oh, don't use your real e-mail
address, or instead use a disposable one or alias to register. Someone
yanked out the e-mail addresses of their forum users and started sending
out porn mails.
Four, they only support 32-bit Windows. Version 3 of their firewall for
Windows 64 Vista was supposedly planned for March or May. I just looked
at it's not out yet (although maybe there is a beta version somewhere).
Even if they come out in time, decide if you really want to be using the
first version of a new code branch of a product (i.e., do YOU want to be
the one bleeding on the bleeding edge?).
Go read their forum on their firewall. Remember that you will only see
complaints there. Users don't normally go to forums to extol or laud a
product but go there to get help on problems with the product. So the
bias will be slanted against a product if you go by the forum posts
asking for help, but it will give you an idea of the magnitude of
problems or the severity of a few problems. It's free and you could
trial it for awhile to see if YOU like it and if it *continue* working
for you. If it doesn't work right, uninstall it.
