Best free firewall for Windows? - Ask DLS

I cast my vote for Jetico.
In its favor i can say that i never encountered such a meticulous and relentless firewall. almost nothing can hide from it - inbound, outbound or internally. However, it is not a friendly firewall and requires some care and understanding if you want to get the most of it.

I used to be a happy Sygate user, but since Symantec killed it I switched over to Comodo to stay up to date. They did a nice upgrade a few month ago and I like its configurability (?). ZA is just a pain to upgrade and to tweak... have you tried to uninstall it?

I, too, Like Sygate, but our new RoadRunner ISP offers the Ca suite free (read za) and it's ok. What am I going to do at the end of my free year? Right back to my Sygate.

If you use WinPatrol by Bill, it is ALSO a big help for telling you whenever anything is added after a download and happily removing it for you if you so desire. I used the free version for 2 years and the plus had more to offer so I finally bought it. One charge for a lifetime. I'm on year 2 with the paid version now.

Bug free with AVG,WinPatrol and Sygate for 4 years...now with CA *ZA* whatever, we'll see.

Sugar

Sygate for me.

Simple, solid and stable. Mainly use it to monitor outbound traffic - it's amazing [disturbing] how many applications try to access the network without permission!

Mind you I do hate how the applications dialog cannot be resized. How stupid to put a mutli-column list box in a non-sizable dialog .. grrr

Zone Alarm rocks and the best part is its free, been using it for a long time.

Zone Alarm free version.

COMODO FIREWALL
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1969207,00.asp

I wouldn't rely on NAT alone as your security measure! sure new age hardware devices with SPI and NAT are cool and go a long way to helping you out, nothing beats a good virus scanner and a personal firewall (its a pity Tiny Personal Firewall isnt free anymore!)

there are many many other things a GUI firewall does that will help secure your PC. As stated previously, something to manage outgoing connections is the best way to go.

I'm using Win2000 and I've used all the free firewalls mentioned on this blog

I currently use .... Comodo and winPatrol

Go to www.grc.com and www.firewallleaktester.com and test the security of your firewall
This will give you objective info to choose a secure firewall

Thought this might be of interest

Each firewall was tested twice against 26 leak tests - once with its default, out-of-the-box settings, and once with its highest security settings. Each firewall was then awarded an overall score derived from its pass/fail result against each test.

http://www.matousec.com/projects/windows-personal-firewall-analysis/leak-tests-results.php

I have tried several free firewall solutions, zonelabs, kerio etc. The best for my needs (including sometimes using a pc as a gateway) turned out to be net vedas safety net. Rather interesting product, passed all tests i did

Look 'n' Stop Petrsonal Firewall is my favorite for many years. It's light (4 Mb of memory) and passed all tests I tryed on it. Also have pre-conficured basic reules, which can be changed, and ask only for acces of newbies when they try to connect. I did try lots of "popular" and "new" firewalls but I did always came back to Look 'n' Stop.

(http://www.looknstop.com)

zone alarm slow down the internet connection...its 100% tested