Whilst in the process of upgrading and tweaking the hell out of WinXP Pro, a friend that was over helping out in the long, tedious process turned me onto a site that I think that everyone should know about.

The site is called Gibson Research Corporation. And while they sell services and software they also have a wonderful test for your computer.

I had uninstalled Zone Alarm Pro. It was just TO intense. Slowed my activities down to a crawl and my e-mail (already protected by Norton) was even slower and that's not OK to me.

So there I was with just my Norton Anti Virus running and I went out to GRC and ran the test, I failed just about all of them except for the Virus Scan tests. The ports failed and my NetBios were exposed, NOT GOOD!!! So then I went ahead and invoked the onboard XP Firewall, works really good according to this sites tests!!! Everything passed with flying colors and the Firewall is set up to allow for you to do what you need to do without slowing you down, to much. I notice a bit of slowness but not enough to want to turn it off.

Zone Alarm may be considered #1 but in my book it seems to almost cripple the system. Playing with the settings did not seem to help. It's also a bear to uninstall!!! XP's Firewall works well. I'm sticking with that for the time being and maybe I'll look into Nortons Personal Firewall later on!!

Here is the address for the page: GRC testing Do both tests: "Test My Shields" and "Probe My Ports". Let us know how you did, OK??

PS: They also have some freeware you might be interested in too!! [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

Good Luck!! [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

Richard [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

---Wolff On The Prowl---