Firewalls are essentially electronic gatekeepers. A program will ask the firewall if it can collect or send data from the computer. Some are preset like the Windows firewall others ask for user input to set-up the firewall rules. Requests from ports 25, 80 and 110 should be allowed. Ports 25 and 110 are mainly mail, pop and smtp ports while 80 is the main internet port used by the browser. Almost every other port request can be refused. There are a few exceptions. With a new a installation there will be internal requests from the PC components which need to be allowed but after a short trial and error exercise you will learn what not to allow. If not, call me and we can discuss the settings.

Sygate Personal Firewall although no longer supported, is still available and works very well, but due to lack of support for Sygate and the move by Microsoft to yet another operating system I have decided to run some tests.

Jetico Firewall. It requires a lot of training (you have to set the permissions - tell it yes and no) but it works well and does what it is designed to do, but after a short period it started to give trouble with random lock ups. After exhaustive tests I have decided to install and register

Kerio Personal Firewall 4. Registration is $19.95 and $9.95 renewal yearly. I paid by credit card. It's good value for money and has a few extra features than Sygate. Recently I have disovered some incompatabilities with Kerio. I have contacted Kerio and they say it will be fixed soon. Soon is not good enough, when I have already paid for the product. Lesson learned!

COMODO Firewall Pro. Log "CFP_Setup_English_2.4.16.174" into your favourite Search Engine and download it. This is my new Firewal, in the wake of Kerio.