ADSL. Sweet. I haven't actually tried testing the speed of this thing (at least twice as fast as the old 56K as far as loading forum pages, anyway) but I got a deal where it costs the same as my old dial-up for most of the next year, and my phone line is finally free. Me likey.

Now, I'm thinking I finally need a firewall. I could do a search for possible suggestions; in fact, I have a few committed to memory from poll threads But I want to know what's the best for a newb. I see people talking about what packets go out port 233 and only keeping port 80 open for their server and a bunch of other crap I don't understand. What's a decent free firewall for idiots? And once I get the hang of it, what firewall should I step up to? Anyone have any other random input? Thanks

I recomend Zonealarm, hasn't failed me yet.
It's simple; a program tries to connect to the internet and zonealarm pops-up a window asking for your permission (which has a nice remember this checkbox so you won't be bothered every time)

ZA is probably the most newbie-friendly personal firewall, but I'd still recommend Kerio Personal Firewall - the learning curve isn't that much steeper than ZA, and it gives you a heck of a lot more control. And ZA feels a bit... bloated.

Don't worry about which ports should be open and which shouldn't - just give access to the applications you want and you should be fine with the rest on default settings.

Okay, I'll give Kerio a shot. (yikes; 2MB in 20 seconds!!1 )

BTW, how might I go about checking if there's a trogan on my system? And I am still a bit paranoid about staying online for long periods, but I think I'll try being on MSN/ICQ more often. My brother is probably wondering why he never sees me online Probably better find out if Miranda or Gain still work with MSN; what happened with that?

General rambling follows: it's been a good "stuff" week for me. Two Amazon books (both on finance management), my modem, a new stereo (my old one was mostly broken) and some nice relaxed-fit jeans since I needed new pants I was going to get the stereo in a paycheck or two, but Wal-Mart (when I went for my pants) had a good deal on a 3-CD/radio/tape system with a remote even (under 70 bucks). Their Gamecubes are a friggin' steal now at 116 bucks; that's the same price their GBA SP's are going for! PS2/XBox is still over 200 bucks though

I suggest HouseCall or AVG Antivirus.

Both of which are free, and very good

edit: Ohh.. and Gaim works fine with MSN. just get the latest version.

23 you should get a copy of ZA like everyone else has told you... but if you have a spare old pc you could set up a ipcop firewall. IPCop is quite easy to setup + free. You can also use this firewall to share the internet connection(if that appeles to you).

Gaim still works with MSN

I have AVG, Ad-Aware, and (soon) Kerio going. Anything else?

I like Miranda more than Gaim ... I'm going to go get the latest version and see if it works ...

while you are spending all your loons, you could cobble together a Linux box as a proper firewall/server. It's sweet having a Linux box just a PuTTY away

Once I get my money situation together, I'm going to think about building a good computer from scratch. When that happens, I'm going to use this one to play with Linux

And Gaim is being mean to me "23yrold3yrold has been disconnected"; thanks, how informative. I wish my compiler had helpful messages like that ("Error: does not compile") ...

My friend Adam lives out in the middle of bum-yuck nowhere, and has Dial-Up (worst place to have dial-up, too). Whenever he comes over, he downloads gigabytes upon gigabytes of stuff and burns it to CD.. and he's continuously muttering "I hate you." over and over again while doing it.

I like to use McAfee's Stinger app. Works very well, and is the least bloatiest virus program you will ever find. It can't GET any leaner without sacrificing user friendliness.
It's a standalone program, too, so there's no installation process at all. Just download and run.

Save up an X-Box or PS2 fund util boxing day. I know I'm going to be going crazy. Every single year I find sweet deals, but never have any money.. this year shall be different.

Congratulations on getting high speed

Heh, at CMU we have discovered download speeds for which the harddrive is actually the bottleneck, and if you save the file to dev/null speeds of ... oh, 8 megs a second, are not impossible to attain.

Speaking of AVG, I did read a very negative review of it in the recent past. I believe it claimed that about half of the test viruses got through, whereas for other virus programs the percent was more like <10%. So I'm not too sure that it's the best option ... does anyone know of a well-conducted, non-biased analysis of virus software and such? Are these fears well founded?

Outpost is a very good firewall, I used to use it but I have chaged to Norton now a days. Outpost you can get it free for personal use, I administration is really easy. It learns gradually from your network use and there by creating filters and rules.

You can even write your own plugins for it.

Google for 'Outpost' or 'Agnitum' IIRC, that is the company that makes Outpost.

I remember reading something bad about AVG as well, but I don't think it was as bad as half the virus getting through. I used to use it for a while, but now I just use Norton Systemworks - much better!

If your looking for (another) firewall, you might want to try out Sygate Personal Firewall as well.

Thinking of getting a new computer? Why not try one of these...

You bought two books from Amazon on finance management.

You'd think the first fule of finiance management would be not to buy too many books from Amazon.

Why's that, Eric? Amazon.ca would most likely save 23 on PST, because it's outside his province... and it's generally the same price or cheaper than local stores, or places like Chapters.

I always buy my DVDs, Games and Books there. Cheaper, I don't need to leave the house (which can be a pain without a car), and it's "Free Shipping" on orders over $40 ($39).

Just my 2 cents.

I notice Amazon now carries video games. I was thrilled since their prices are usually so low ... then I found out they're still full price since it's just Toys 'R' Us' service. Bummer.

I know AVG got a bad review somewhere, but it's worked well for me, and I forget the name of the freeware program that got a good review (starts with an 'A' ...)

Eski Ninja: What?!?! That computer is too good to be true!

Firewall's up. Should I be at all concerned that a bazillion (by which, I mean a half dozen or so) people/computers/things constantly want to send me ICMP packets (usually calling itself a "tcpip kernel driver")? Denying them isn't affecting my ability to view all the web pages I normally do. They mostly have names that imply they're local. What's up with these things? Signs of a trogan on my system? Just random arsewipe hackers?

I'm going to read Kerio's docs later when I get a chance (before anyone tells me to RTFM )

tcpip kernel driver sounds like something vital for the TCP-IP protocol but I don't know much about these things.

It's alive!!

23: that "tcp/ip kernel driver" is actually the MSBlaster virus.

you aren't running 2k or XP are you?

Nope, Win98 (this isn't common knowledge by now?) Thanks for the tip; that bloody thing was hitting me hard.

And I'm presently on a Mac laptop of some kind, and I see my avatar is fubared Lovely ... I hate IE. changes avatar

yikes!! win98?? that bloody os is unstable, time to upgrade, buddy!

Kerio is the best firewall available and it's free for personal use. It can however be annoying when it comes to ICS/file sharing at first but then it performs really well and doesnt take much resources

Dude, I hear that about every Windows OS Depending on the person I'm talking to, 2000 is the best, XP is the best, 98 is the best, etc.

I just wanted to make sure it was a good idea to cut that stuff off. Only things I let through my firewall so far are mIRC, Firebird, and Thunderbird.

Nothing wrong with '98. Just cause it's buggy and unstable and crashes every 3 seconds doesn't mean its a bad OS - just look at the popularity of the latest version of Windows. Hell, I use it myself because I'm to cheap to buy the latest version of Bugdoes XP.

But seriously, I haven't really had many problems with Windows 98. One of the advantages of having such an out of date system is that most of the newer virii cant/wont infect such an old system!

... I don't know how you get that..
That's just other people/servers scoping you out. My server gets about 10 of those every minute.
Some of them could be related to MSBlaster, but most likely the majority are not.

This person should be shot.
98 sucks. It's very unstable, as mentioned.
Though, I understand you have a celery.. so.. it's pretty much your only option.
I had a 1.7ghz celery in here a week or two ago. Thing took about 2 minutes to boot into XP (Duron 1.2ghz takes about 15 seconds), and about the same amount of time to shut down.
Felt guilty to the guy I was selling it to... but it had a nice motherboard in it that supports up to 3ghz.. and he did get a deal... so....

My dad's Win95 OSR2 has been great for him. I wouldn't put anything more on that machine anyway (p1 233, 64mb ram)

Depends on what you use a machine for.. for development, any 9x (ME) OS is mostly useless. But if you're just surfing or email (but not with Outlook), 98 should be fine, though, I'd recomend 98b at least...

Gee, thanks .... why?

Heh; just noticed me and Derezo have similar looking avatars

That we do...
I should change mine after I get a hair cut.

However, I've been saying that I'm going to get a hair cut since August.. so... ... don't hold your breath.

Mistakes you make are much more likely to bring down the entire OS rather than just give you an error message.

yeah but Derezos is still freakier...

yeah, it does look pervish.

I stronlgy recomment win2k my sister's comp is now running windows 2000 (P II 225 mhz, 32+128 mb ram) and it's an internet gateway.
Win 2k actually runs faster than win 98, but it just asks for more ram.