Need a stupidly simple firewall

Okay, I've been using Comodo on my own machine and love it. However, when I tried to replace Mcafee Security Center on my stepmom's XPS 400, it totally threw off my family with it's prompts. Even worse now they are blaming it, along with the AVG program I installed for "slowing down everything even more" even though I just know that Mcafee was responsible for most of it before. I'm most afraid that they will just click "allow" on every prompt just to make them "go away"

So now I'm looking for a firewall that handles all that for them. I would prefer a firewall only, not a security suite as I already have AVG installed.

Any suggestions? BTW, I plan to just do a complete clean install of XP MCE 2005 and start over, just in case the PC was infected by a zombie or rootkit, thus causing the slowdown.

 

Most firewalls have a setting for prompt level, so that it only asks you when it does not know what to do.

 

I recommend Comodo... and ZoneAlarm to a point.

But you always need to train your firewall initially for any programs that might access the internet.

I DO NOT recommend the crap from Norton SystemWorks and McAffee Suite.

 

Ok so I just noticed this option in Comodo: If I turned "Component Monitoring" off would it lower my protection level significantly? The prompts that throw off the rest of my family the most are coming from this-For Example: "Thunderbird.exe is attempting to send special window messages to Firefox.exe"

How are normal computer users supposed to determine whether this is good or bad?

How about Windows Firewall, I know, I know inbound monitoring only, but it never really threw prompts around. If I use that on a clean system, would that provide adaquate protection. Keep in mind that only general web surfing is done on that system, no P2P stuff.

 

IMO, you are better of with built in Windows Firewall. It doesn't kill system resources. It won't corrupt your OS. It's good enough for most people.

I have been using Norton Internet Security for almost a year and the only thing that it catches is program that I know is harmless. But Norton is a system resources killer. I will soon remove it and just install pure anti virus software without firewall that doesn't kill system resources.

 

I would say for them Windows firewall and call it good.

Hendra, I've had the misfortune of having "Norton the Virus" on a computer about 5 or 6 years ago....it took an act of congress to uninstall it. Neeeever again

 

Norton is one notorious program to uninstall and Zone Alarm is also a pain to un-install. Windows regular Firewall and Windows Defender is good enough.

 

i would suggest that u sit down and go thru a list of apps that ur family uses, and "teach" comodo to monitor without prompt on these.

also, u might want to revisit all the system startups and services and check them off as which u can trust and let comodo always allow network acess

once it is done, ur family will be happier and if something out of the norm pops up, it would be legitimate to be blocked

cheers ...