Free Firewall?

[nc211]

I'm trying to reconfigure a tiny Sony laptop I inherited "thanks Principal Financial ;) " that is a 600 mhz at max. I've got ME on it now. I had XP, but it killed the battery just starting the thing, so I put the oem package on it, and shut everything down that wasn't vital. I currently have Norton 05' Firewall on it, all up to date and such...but it drains the system.

Question: Does anyone know of a good free firewall program that will simply monitor and protect incoming and outgoing traffic in an update manner, that won't drain the system? Norton gets all over the place and slows things down.

As a trade, I offer you this awesome little program called Net Medic. They don't make this anymore "Havent for YEARS since Lucent bought them out" but it's an awesome little networking monitor device that has never given me one lick of trouble. It'll even tell you where in the pings has the slow down.... It's V. 1.2, and I've had it on all of my computers since the windows 95 days.

It will trip your firewall protection when you turn it on. You can tell the firewall to block the communication if you like, and it will still work.

I vouch for this program's integrity, and am just passing along a good little something that I've know for years. Please feel free to Yahoo it for reviews first. It's Vital Sign's "Net Medic V. 1.2"

PM me you email address and I"ll send it to you via attachment w/ pass key code.

PS: It takes me 19 Hops to get to this site....just one of the cool features.

[93LSOwner]

Have you tried searching http://www.download.com/

How much memory is in the laptop?

[nc211]

yeah man, been all over download. com...but reading the user's reviews isn't very comforting....

this thing is old....112 mb of ram...aka...casio watch....

One good thing about the 98 platform is the ability to see the performance tab in my computer.....got the system down to using 24% of resources to run, with full security on a wireless card.

[indiasfinest]

panda antivirus is good, 6 months of free updates and after that your on your own. no more updates but the program works fine, i like it much more than mcafee and norton. norton is VERY annoying. this tells you when something tries to access the network/internet and vice versa. not annoying at all, had it for over a year and no viruses, also system scan and recovery option included. i think i got it from microsoft.com, just type in firewalls/

[Rx330driver]

you really dont need an anti-virus software

well i cant really say that cause i have one, but i find spyware scanners much more useful for everyday internet/computer security. Try downloading SPYBOT, great little program. And i also have something called WINDOW WASHER, which erases all internet files stored on your computer. Every month i get rid of at least 1 gb of useless stuff from the internet. good way to keep your computer up and running

btw, maybe its time for a new computer :P