wot is the best allround firewall? do they prevent access to your pc? wot are people trying to acheive if they do get access? im using neowatch at the moment and on 15 occasions the same ip add tried to gain access this had nothin to do with wot i was doin at the time i beleive, would they have given up or did they manage to get in? any info would be very usefull thanx

Zone Alarm is excellent. THe regular version is free and the Pro version is $39.99. Most probably, a probe was done trying to map addresses. The firewall will make it look like the address they just probed does not exist.

also it prevents any software/app's to 'phone home' with your info and surfing habits. Many times when I go online on certain programs that I had, zone alarm would block the message from my computer. Zone Alarm is great, a must, have them on both my 98 and ME.

i think we this discussion is not new here in this excellent forum. maybe these links to some of the places where firewalls are the topic might be interesting: there are more places...

hmm, something went wrong, no links then, but this advice: do a search on 'firewall' in the Me forum: you'll find general discussions of firewalls, of zonealarm and other

spooner, neowatch is as good as anything out there. i use it too and am very happy with it. yes, it is surprising how many times your system gets attacked for information but neowatch does a good job of keeping them out.

Hallo All, Hmmm...I think ZoneAlarm and Norton Inetrnet Security is excellent products. I run both of them to protect me from prying eyes over the net. My ports are well stealthed by ZA and double-fenced by NIS. I can manage Cookies, ActiveX and nasty Ads by NIS. And for virus protection I use InoculateIT (FREE: search at : http://cws.internet.com, http://www.download.com, http://www.tucows.com). I have tried NeoWatch. Nice GUI and nice features such as back trace and reports features. But I think it is much less effective than ZA and NIS because there is no apps access control. That means trojans, worms, zombies and Spyware, etc..etc..can call home. NeoWatch is as good as or/and as bad as BlackICE Defender. If you such a techie or like to read and learn I can recommend you Tiny Personal Firewall, but it will give you headache if you dont used to configure firewall before. For advice and recommendation for security issues and firewall issues go to: http://www.grc.com.