Norton Personal Firewall 2002
by Symantec
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Software Reviews of Norton Personal Firewall 2002
Customer Review: A detailed personal firewall
Summary: 5 Stars
I just had a few miscellaneous comments to make.Norton Personal Firewall is one of the three main packages out there offering this capability, along with Fail-Safe Technologies ZoneAlarm Pro 2, and McAfee's own McAfee Firewall software. These products work by monitoring all TCP/IP and IP Port activity on your system, and by acting (hopefully intelligently) on such activity when it occurs to keep the bad guys out of your system.
I run this under Windows XP, and so far it's worked quite smoothly. The program is more complex and is more difficult to configure if you want to customize the settings than ZoneAlarm Pro 2, but that's to be expected given all the extra options. Since I use this for a home PC, I may not need all the extra filtering and customizing capabilties that this offers, but it's okay. You have it if you want it.
I switched over to this program when I had some conflicts with ZoneAlarm Pro 2, although I like the simpler, more intuitive interface of it better than Norton. The conflicts may have been with Netsonic's Netboost caching program, rather than with Norton Anti-Virus, and I still need to do a better job of troubleshooting to nail that down. If I can resolve the conflicts, I might switch back to ZoneAlarm Pro 2, for one reason.
I can't seem to figure out how to configure Norton so that it pops up an alert whenever a program trys to access the net, so that at that point you can decide whether or not you want to permit it. You can set up logging so that it monitors everything, and you can even set up customized rules that are fairly detailed, but not this. I figure there has to be a way, but what with the extra complexity of the program I just haven't seen it yet, but I've looked at all the screens.
One thing Norton does implement better than ZoneAlarm Pro 2 is what it calls "Intrusion Detection." This pops up an alert when port-scanning is detected. ZoneAlarm Pro 2 does this simply by alerting you to every inbound attempt to communicate with your system, so it's really no different, but if it works right, you'll be informed of actual port scans whereas ZoneAlarm Pro 2 may not tell you that's what happening, it'll just say there was an unauthorized attempt to communicate with your system.
Obviously, there is a trade-off here between a program's ease of use and how much the developer wants to communicate to the user (who may not be that technically literate) all the details of what the firewall is seeing that's going on "under the hood." Since I was a professional NT system administrator for many years, I'd like to know about it just for general curiosity's sake, although it's probably not that important for most people.
I can't comment on Norton's product versus McAfee's, since I haven't used it myself, but I'd be interested in knowing how it compares with the McAfee offering.
Anyway, so far Norton's Personal Firewall has worked quite well and I'm very satisfied with it. I'll be extremely satisfied with it if I can just figure out how to do that one thing I mentioned.
Customer Review: So far so good
Summary: 4 Stars
I bought this program when I had to return ZoneAlarm Pro2, which kept periodically completely locking down my system, possibly due to conflicts with Netboost or Norton Anti-Virus. I liked the interface better than the Norton firewall, and another thing I liked is that it would tell you the actual IP address of an incoming computer that was attempting to do anything, and would give you the actual filename of the program on your system for anything that was trying to get out. Norton doesn't do that, unfortunately.However, I was forced to return ZoneAlarm because of the conflicts. Norton's product says it's is tested and integrated with their own Anti-Virus software, and so far I haven't had any of the problems I had with ZoneAlarm. I hope it stays that way, but I've only been using it for a couple of days. By that time, however, ZoneAlarm had rendered my system completely useless for accessing the net.
As I was a professional system administrator for 15 years, and have a lot of experience with Windows NT, I may try to troubleshoot somemore and see if I can figure out what went wrong with ZoneAlarm, since if I could get it to work okay, I'd stick with that.
However, for now Norton is working well and it's certainly a good product too. If you're a system administrator like I was, the fact that it's supposed to integrate smoothly with Norton's Anti-Virus software is a major selling point in its favor, since system stability is of overriding imporance in a server environment.
Customer Review: OK Protection For Personal Surfing But...
Summary: 3 Stars
I have a Windows XP home edition computer with dial up internet access. For my own personal web surfing, it is OK. But I have to disable the software when working at home because it prevents me from accessing our company's computer network via the dial up virtual private network. It is easy to disable the product. But then, I loose the firewall protection. So this product's usefulness is somewhat limited for me. But it does work OK for personal web surfing.Customer Review: Good protection but computer keeps crashing
Summary: 2 Stars
The software comes with my cable modem. When the cable guy came to set me up, he preferred not to install the firewall software that comes with the cable driver CD. Now I guess I know why. Don't take me wrong, in several occasion I was...happy that it stopped every attempted attacks. It was able to detect attempted hacks from Korea and Canada. Pretty neat-huh?! Well, I will give a brief introduction of what the software consists below."Internet Status" section reports the number of attempted intrusions and attempted attacks. "Personal Firewall Settings" section let you configure security level (custom level, high, low and medium). "Personal Firewall Internet Access Control" scans for applications that transfers and receives data from the net, and you can decide whether to permit the application to do so. "Personal Firewall Internet Zone Control" allows you to specify sites/IP addres that you want to allow access to your computer and sites/IP address that you want to restrict from accessing your computer. Personally, I find this to be very useful especially when you have the IP address of the node that tries to hack your computer. "Personal Firewall Intrusion Protection" is very cool, it can automatically restrict an IP address if it tries to scan for your ports (can choose to disable auto restrict). "Privacy control" with option of low, medium and high level of protection on your credit card, email address and cookies information to reach the net. "Ad blocking" does not work very well. Like the other posting says, it blocks some graphics and failed to block ads.
The firewall gave me problems the very first day I installed the product. I had my computer running for 4 years without any problem. When I got it installed, my computer crashes at least 5 times a day. Initially I thought someone planted a trojan or some sort of proxy on my computer. Then today (after 8 days with the product) I come to realize the SymProxySvc.exe which failed to respond today. So I checked the web and linked to Amazon. Here I found the same sort of problems that others had faced. I agree that disabling the firewall helped coz I was able to have my computer up without crashing when I disabled the firewall program once. I will check out Symantec's web site on the workaround solution that others had mentioned. I strongly recommend you to check out some other product...until Symantec fixed this error. (Do get a firewall especially with cable modem, if you think you are secure think again!!) Best of luck.
Customer Review: A Very Spotty Product
Summary: 1 Stars
Norton Personal Firewall 2002 is neither the easiest-to-use product of its type, nor does it offer the best protection.I found the program to be very tempermental: it worked very well when I first installed it, but it stopped working altogether shortly thereafter. Even after I got it working again, it failed to protect against TCP probes (a very common hacker attack).
I am not a internet security expert, although I am generally very comfortable with complex software, and I simply could not get this program to work reliably.
Do yourself a favor and try ZoneAlarm Pro instead: I found it to offer much better security, more reliable operation, and to be much easier to control.