I have just installed Comodo Personal Firewall 2.1.1.1 on an 850 MHz AMD Athlon with 320 MB RAM running Windows 2000 Pro Service Pack 4 with all updates. If I log on as Administrator everything runs well but if I log on as one of the two Users set up on the computer i find that cpf.exe uses 99% of the CPU and everything goes EXTREMELY slowly. If I switch back to Administrator then cpf.exe uses 0% of the CPu and response is very snappy.
Any ideas of what I can do about this short of switching back to ZoneAlarm?
running same 2.1.1.1 on a Pent III with 512k ram, zero problems with 100% cpu utilization. Running Xp with Sp2.
Most personal firewalls need the users to have Admin rights or you need to setup a service account with admin rights to run comodo firewall services. It sounds like a rights problem to me.
I would toss more memory into that PC and bring it up to 512meg min or at least 1gig. That will keep your hd from getting pounded by win2k using it for virt memory.
I’ve don’t some more testing. set up new users with User, Power User and administrator rights. User and Power User have cpf.exe sitting at 100% CPU utilization, Administrator user has cpf.exe sitting at 0%. Change user rights up to Administrator and CPU goes to 0%. Change rights down and CPU goes to 99% again.
There is no way I’m going to give my users Administrative rights. I have enough trouble removing the problems they install when they are only Users.
I look after about 100 computers, all but 3 of which run Windows 2000 and they definitely don’t need 512 MB of RAM. As a general rule the disk doesn’t start being thrashed until there is under 160 MB of RAM. Remember that Win2K came out in the days of 64 MB to 128 MB computers.
Spot on - 320MB of RAM for Win2K in a business or educational environment (given you’ve quoted 100 PCs, I’m assuming a business or an educational institiute) is plenty - more would be better, but 320 is more than enough.
The admin/poweruser/user rights issue is being looked into by Comodo. You sound like you really know what you’re on about, so I’d send a detailed email to support@comodo.com with full details on your test results - CPU utilisation under different accounts, total RAM, available RAM, O/S version (incl. service pack levels), any other security apps, LAN O/s etc.) - any details that you feel may help the support guys. The better a picture you can paint of your landscape, the easier it will be for them to respond and rectify.
