I saw that result few days back, I was impressed by its performance so thought of giving it a try. I generally shuffle between Comodo, Outpost and Online Armour. I don’t use or try other firewall b’coz as a experience beta tester I know what they really capable of. For the last 8 months or so I’m using Comodo firewall, it’s much better than Outpost and OA in terms of “peace of mind” – I mean in giving satisfactory protection with little annoyance. But of late it also started behaving like the other two firewalls. So I was feeling agitated with it also. For e.g: in my limited user account it was not loading properly in system tray, sometimes it appears in disable form in system tray – I mean small icon rather than big white icon. Outpost though a good firewall but it starts blocking ur internet when u set it up to high setting for maximum protection. For e.g: even in a legitimate port scanning it blocks ur connection for a while. It also give other problem also. Problem with OA premium is it’s a memory hog! And u have to configure lot of settings from inside to get maximum protection. Its free version in my view is useless.
So this was my experience with these top 3 firewalls. I also believed we still don’t have great, all feature, light firewall. So I was always in the look for one such firewall which can provide all these features.
After seeing the latest result of mataousec security (whom I trust a lot) which gave top position to PC tools firewall (and given its reputation in security field) I felt fascinated enough to give it a try. So I un-install Comodo and installed PC tools FW. Just after installing it, it starts showing its buggy ■■■■. I soon began to question my wisdom for installing such a half baked product. After installation, it slowed down loading and booting time of my XP SP 3 PC. Worse still, after getting loaded, when I right-clicked on its icon in system tray, it showed nothing! Tried many times but nothing helped! Went to start, program and PC tool shortcut, clicked on it but still not GUI appeared! Checked installation log, it says, NDIS driver installation failed but then why the hell it didn’t tell me abt this during installation which completed successfully! ? It has loads of problem other than this. U can visit their forum and see urself. I’ve un-installed it, I’ll install it again, once they iron out all those bugs and increase performance. The reason I’ll install it again b’coz other than OA it’s the only firewall which has got top position in mataousec test.
I wish Comodo soon launched new version of its firewall which passes all those tests. And also fixed the problem which its firewall encounters occasionally during system start – some of its features get disabled sometime and its icon becomes small.
it’s very good for protection ?
do u know that vista 64bit SP1 without any protection installed, no windows FW, no UAC, no windows defender, scored 180/340 on this test ?
and i didnt test windows 7 64, maybe it would score better. http://ailef.neuf.fr/COMODO_34_Leaktests_result_vista64.htm
so if this test of pc tools is correct, u dont need to install it if u use vista 64bit SP1.
maybe i should test windows 7 64bit to see if it scores better.
online armor scores better on this test, i think it scores as good as comodo.
so i’m not sure that PC Tools is a good choice, for matousec it seems that it’s a great FW but if it really scores 190/340 on comodo leaktests, you’re as safe as if u were using vista SP1 64bit without any protection…
do u know that vista 64bit SP1 without any protection installed, no windows FW, no UAC, no windows defender, scored 180/340 on this test ?
and i didnt test windows 7 64, maybe it would score better.
http://ailef.neuf.fr/COMODO_34_Leaktests_result_vista64.htm
so if this test of pc tools is correct, u dont need to install it if u use vista 64bit SP1.
maybe i should test windows 7 64bit to see if it scores better.
online armor scores better on this test, i think it scores as good as comodo.
so i'm not sure that PC Tools is a good choice, for matousec it seems that it's a great FW but if it really scores 190/340 on comodo leaktests, you're as safe as if u were using vista SP1 64bit without any protection...
WoW, I couldn't agree more, I think Nortan just rigged it's own software to get better scores.
It made my PC freeze to the point of having to pull the power cable off. This hapenned when trying to update and when trying to tune up settings. Considering I installed it twice (with three weeks interval) it adds up to four freezes. The GUI is bugged as well.
It’s a shame though, because from what I saw it is very configurable. And from Matousec’s tests it’s effective also.
i just tested the last version on windows 7 64, i wanted to test it before installing the last comodo release.
the firewall worked fine but it’s very simple and i prefere the comodo FW cause i can get any alert of any process of any type.
the problem with this pc tools FW+ was when i uninstalled it. all went wrong, i had errors and when i tried to reinstall comodo, i had simply no more trafic i was able to see, all worked except i wasnt able to see the trafic, inbound : 0 / outbound : 0 / trafic : no process…and i couldnt fix that.
so i recovered with my system backup (acronis 2010) and all was good.
i dont know what happened but i’m not going to reinstall any program of this team on my machine.
Just tested it on my laptop, why? I like products simple efficient and snappy and so far CIS has been a good product but is heading towards a kind of “do it all” tool and we know how it may lead? Norton pack 2050 … LOL
And latest update havent been smooth (error 113 so it seems because I couldnt upgrade from 3.12 to 3.14 !!!)
CIS is becoming more complex and it is probably why some of us are getting more in trouble. Finger crossed it is ok for me but …
So I gave PC Tools FW plus a try and it seems to do what it should without any stuff we dont need. Firewall is ok and application control well seems to be ok too in a day to day usage. Most of users dont need that fine grain control but something that simply works and for my part: do control application behaviour efficiently, showing access to what is going on in simple straight manner.
I hope Comodo will not lose this perspective. I know it can be configured in a simpler interface but then I am not sure the control level is the same. PC Tools FW+ seems to be achieving quite a bit relying on a simple mode of operation.
