Replacing NAV with NOD32

[Jayno]

Downloaded and installed Comodo but it disabled my Alcatel Speedtouch modem. Uninstalled it and retried a couple of times to no avail. Now trialing Outpost, which seems to work fine.

[andsome]

Sorry you had a problem with Comodo. There was probably a simple tick needed somewhere, it's the first time I have heard of such a problem. Hope Outpost suits.

[Jayno]

Well, I must say I liked Outpost, that is for 24 hours. It slowed my puta down to a crawl (worse than Norton) and made my internet all but unusable. I uninstalled it and everything came good again.

Then searched for a lite and fast Firewall to try and decided to go for SecureUp Firewall, an oldish one that Tucows gave 5 stars and various reviewers said wouldn't slow down my puta. It didn't, but when a ran the Grisoft "Shields Up" test I was shocked to find it left my puta ip address hanging out on the web for anyone to abuse, and all sorts of opened ports, vulnerable BIOSes etc etc.

I disabled SecureUp and re-enabled Windows XP Firewall, then ran the "Shields Up" test again ... result was my puta completely invisible to the web and 100% pass on all Grisoft's list of checks. What an interesting result, considering the slagging the XP Firewall gets.

So, I have now also uninstalled SecureUp, thanks very much, and will stick to a security strategy of using the Windows XP Firewall and a mix of good AV/Spy/Ad/Troj/Malware security software this side of it.

I will keep an open mind about maybe trying the forthcoming Firewall from Eset that Andsome referred to, especially if it follows their NOD32 principle of adopting only a small memory footprint. Having run NOD for a few days I like it very much indeed.