Free Firewall Software

Many of us live in a world where we don’t think bad things can happen to good people. We need to step into reality and realize that anything can happen to anyone. Hackers and identity thieves don’t care whose computer they hack into and put on viruses and steal important information. Didn’t your mother always say ‘better safe than sorry’ anyway? Well we need to make sure we are being safe when it comes to our home computers. People may think that antivirus software is enough be we really need to have firewalls installed on our computer as well. And luckily there is a wide variety of free firewall software available with a few clicks of your mouse.

Let’s talk about the importance of having a firewall program on your computer. There are a variety of viruses that can infest your computer. A general virus can normally only be transferred directly by the user by downloading or installed forcefully through unprotected areas. These have become quite protected through your general antivirus software. That is why the Trojan horse virus was invented to combat this protections software.

The Trojan horse virus is named after the historical Trojan back in ancient Greek times. It’s a virus that is meant to fool the antivirus software into thinking that it’s benign and just a typical junk file. But just like the Trojan horse, when allowed into the walls it breaks out the virus and can infect your computer. Luckily most free firewall programs can protect from Trojans and other malwares.

Newer versions of Trojans and other viruses are constantly being implemented into the internet and across the web. That is why it is necessary to not just have your firewall software but to do updates as often as possible and to have it scan your computer at least once a week to try to find any files that don’t belong. As it finds them you need to be responsible to dispose of them to make sure that they don’t infect your computer.

People are getting more and more desperate to somehow hack into and invade your computer. You can never be too careful and you should research to find the best free firewall software to keep your identity and computer safe from these types of hackers. Firewall software is becoming more and more user friendly and easy to manage. It is worth the effort to protect your computer. Because remember: Momma always said ‘Better safe than sorry.’

The Best Free Firewall website has additional information that you might find useful.

Best Free Firewall

There are several good free firewall software programs, but one of the Best Free Firewall programs is ZoneAlarm basic.  The basic version of ZoneAlarm has all you need and it is so well optimized you will never know it is running in the background until it warns you of a possible problem.  ZoneAlarm is a little naggy but, you can tell it to stop reminding you that Internet Explorer is trying to access the Internet by simple checking a box and telling ZoneAlarm not to keep asking.

Some of the expensive commercial products are not that well optimized and slow down your computer by doing many unnecessary scans.  I use to by Norton and McAfee each year, but since I started using ZoneAlarm I have never had a reason to change.  Besides now I use imaging software so if I ever do get compromised or infected I simple restore my operating system from a know good configuration in about 10 minutes.  Imaging provides a fresh well optimized operating system that runs fast as if it were brand new.

Norton Ghost and Partimage are the two imaging programs I use and teach my students to use.  Partimage is free Open Source and runs just like Norton Ghost from a Live Linux CD.  Live CDs are bootable and run independent of your hard drive.  I like to use Norton Ghost because I can run it on a DOS bootable CD and it runs very quickly.  I restore 35 lab computers on a daily basis and it takes me about 10 minutes to restore all 35 computers form a compressed 6 gig image that includes SolidWorks.

Like can be good with a little knowledge and the right tools.