Advice please!

[Rapier Racer]

Should I renew my McAfee anti-virus and firewall subscription or are there any free programs out there that would do the job just as well? I was told that McAfee was rubbish, help!

[Jaspers]

Mcafee and Norton aren't the best. No virus protection can prevent you getting every virus out there, but those two take the most resources on your system. For your firewall I would suggest Zone Alarm, and for virus protection Antivir (www.free-av.com) is a good one. Both are free and do their job well. Antivir is updated frequently. Zone Alarm is annoying to teach at first, you have to say yes or no to allow internet connection to all your online programs, but it's thorough. Hope those help.

[Axel]

McAfee does the job for me. As soon as something attacks the comp, it immediatelly finds and destroys it. McAfee is what I'm sticking too.

[G'Kyl]

I use AntiVir as well. It's a fine program and does what it needs to. One question about firewalls: How does the XP SP2 firewal compare to Zone Alarm? I had problems with Zone Alarm when I tried it for the first time a few years back, but I would give it another try if someone told me it's definitily worth it.. )

Ben

[Rapier Racer]

XP SP2!!!!! I wouldn't touch that if you piad me!

[G'Kyl]

Although I don't know how to pya you ;-) - what's wrong with SP2? I heard some people had problems after the update, but everything worked fine here and I now seem to have a nicely working firewall installed. Not?

[Rapier Racer]

I've read various articles on the web about how bad it is, causing programs to crash for no good reason and halting entire systems and apparently that firewall conflicts with other firewalls although I can’t prove that myself I’ve seen a lot of negative feedback about the SP

[G'Kyl]

Hm, OK, I guess I got lucky then. I gotta admit, though, that I downloaded SP2 instead of the warnings. Could as well have cost me two black eyes... And since I never used another firewall, I won't have to worry about conflicts between two similar programs.

[Lance]

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those of you who do want to use another firewall should switch off XP's built in one. go to your start bar, click ''run'', then type ''msconfig'' in the entry box and press ''ok''. the XP firewall is run as a ''service'' at startup, so click the ''service'' tab on the dialogue box that has appeared and look down the list till you find the XP firewall entry, then uncheck that box.

i don't use XP myself, but i've had to straighten out problems other people have had on XP systems, and firewall conflict is one of the things you should always look for
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