michaelleung: If you can give me the name of a security suite that isn't a RAM/CPU hog, won't bother me during my gaming sessions, won't ask me to allow/deny every time while not making the wrong automatic decisions, will give me a decent peace of mind, won't require me to upgrade every year, I'd love to hear it.
I'd recommend Comodo Internet Security paired with Avast! Free. CIS uses around 3-6 MB of RAM (seriously) and a negligible amount of CPU power. It's also very low on pop-ups; any trusted program will automatically get full access to the monitor and network ports and whatnot even if it tries doing something that CIS hasn't seen yet; the only time it will warn about a safe program is if an unknown program tries to interact with it in a suspicious manner.
As of CIS v4, unknown programs will automatically spawn a
single pop-up window upon first launch; confirming the file as safe through that pop-up will whitelist it, which makes it automatically bypass security checks. If the file is digitally signed you can also check a box in the same pop-up to add that signature to your trusted vendor repository, which will make all future programs signed by that vendor automatically trusted. CIS ships with many common digital signatures, and programs using them are automatically trusted even if a particular program or version didn't exist at the time the signature was added to the database. A program you manually add to the whitelist will be trusted even if you update it to a new version; this is very useful for regularly-patched programs like Steam games and such as you only need to confirm each once (it won't be queried again unless the file name or location changes).
I've used various security suites, but CIS v4 is the only one I've seen where you only get a single pop-up. The whitelist and signature database are also very useful; even the latest and greatest paid security suites (hello Norton 360!) have with very limited whitelisting and typically don't have a user-friendly way of saying "don't ask about this file ever again".
I wouldn't yet recommend CIS to novice users as a must-have because some functions still need to be improved or made a bit clearer, but if one using the likes of Norton 360 wanted to move to a suite that had the same level of security but wasn't a confusing, system-crippling piece of garbage I'd certainly go with this.
Aliasalpha: How is zonealarm these days? The last time I used it it had a special mode called "Shit mode", it was sometimes mis-labelled as "on"
ZoneAlarm is still as rubbish as ever, especially the crippled free version. It has various major flaws, including
terrible leak prevention. While you could do worse than ZoneAlarm its serious flaws and nagging pop-ups combine to make it a less than ideal experience.
