http://www.kerio.com/us/kpf_home.html

Anyone else use this?? It's amazing the stuff that will come snooping around your computer. I had it in popup mode and everytime there was an incoming item it would warn/ask you. I was surprised at the number of messages a guy would get in an hour.

 

I bought this bad boy a couple of months ago:

http://www.alphashield.com/


Seems to work well. There is a 1 Million Dollar prize for anyone that can hack it.

 

I'm not sure how well it would stand up to a concentrated attack, but for the price (free) I think it does well to discorage snoops. I haven't had any problems in the past couple of years I have been using it.....

 

Best one out there is Zone Alarm (www.zonelabs.com). And, you can get a free version, too.

As for all the pops you're getting about the things the firewall sees... there's tons of traffic out there that is totally harmless but will trigger an alert from a firewall - just so you "know it's working for you". But they're harmless stuff, mostly.

You'll get hits from your ISPs DHCP server, from your DNS server etc. Of course, there are malicious "knocks on the door" out there, too.

I disabled my alerter a looooong time ago; I just let Zone Alarm do it's thing.

Oh yeah, and one important thing that many firewalls don't do is monitor OUTGOING traffic... that's as important as what's knocking on the door.

 

Joel is right on about monitoring what goes out as well as what comes in. I use Sygate Personal Firewall.

http://smb.sygate.com/products/spf_pro.htm

It is a good program. You can even tell it what programs can and can't access the net. Like I have Mozilla set for full access. I have windows media player set for "ask". It will ask me if I want a ptrogram to get access. Real good program.

 

I've used Kerio for a long time. Best software firewall out there IMO. I've been on board with their products since WinRoute Pro (1997).