A good firewall

Gilder

So I'm looking for a good firewall for my laptop. It has windows firewall, and it's whatever version of it Vista gets, but I'm thinking I could do better? Time Warner gave me the CA Security Suite for free, but that thing is a huge piece of crap. Maybe not the anti-virus or spyware, but that firewall is a mess. It's constantly using 30-50% of my processing power, maybe more. I immediately uninstalled it because I shouldn't need 60 seconds to bring up my task manager to close the damn firewall when it freezes.

So are there any good free firewalls out there you folks can recommend, or am I fine with what came packaged with the laptop? Am I going to have to buy something? I really don't think I will, but I don't know much about free firewalls. It's kind of hard to go looking online for one as well because I don't have one to protect me while looking for it.

Bartholamue

I used Zone-Alarm for awhile, and while it was okay, it wasn't the best.

Roland_tHTG

Using the built in firewall and using common sense (especially if behind a router) is usually more than enough protection but if you insist (and there are plenty of good reasons for to do so) to use a 3rd party firewall there's some good info to help you pick on this page.

Gilder

Yeah I usually stay on the same five to six sites, but it's when I search for something on google and then go to new and obscure pages that I'd like to have that extra security that I'm not sure if windows firewall provides. I'll give that page a look, thanks.

Shorn Scrotum Man

There is a Computer security thread in Moe's that will have some more ideas.

Personally, Window's Firewall + some good antivirus works pretty well.

The thread I spoke of: http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=108166

Roland_tHTG

OP if that's your main focus read up on siteadvisor. I think there's a firefox plugin for it if that's your browser of choice. Also google does similar by adding the url to the end of

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=

Gilder

Ah, that's a nice thing to have handy if I'm suspicious of the site. And I had seen that topic in Moe's before but I just didn't remember it until I saw it again. Excellent, these should all be helpful.

Reiten

Comodo