Naughty little firewalls
As someone with a computer/engineering background I often get requests to fix computers and questions on how to fix them (I actually got one from a dental nurse yesterday just before the dentist went to work).
The last two house calls that I have done in the last week had similar symptoms and the same root cause. Internet access was either not-existent or program dependent. I have come to suspect 3rd party anti-virus and firewall software when these sorts of problems occur - if only I relied on my first instincts every time.
The first job I quickly uninstalled the anti-virus and firewall package. I then installed AVG Free Anti-virus and enabled the Windows firewall. Problem fixed completely and all over in under half an hour.
The second job had about 5 different things going wrong including wireless printers and messages popping up left, right and centre. Though the anti-virus and firewall software was different, it was still the root cause - sneakily blocking all internet access and locking out the computer from accessing the wireless printer. So once again the solution was the same, but I'd only came to this realisation after about 3.5 hours and two visits.
posted by Robert Ross @ 9:01 PM
2 Comments:
Yeah, firewalls and anti-virus software all have there own quirks that make things always interesting. AVG I have found to be the best for most people, as it is a good virus checker and is straight forward to use. As for a firewall, the windows firewall is not that great, but does not get in the way much at all. (The big reason that it is not so great)
Will say that Zone Alarm is pretty crap, just popular.
Most of the time to get them working well, it takes time and continuous tweaking to get the best performance from a firewall.
I've been a big fan of AVG for about 4 years now - some of the other virus scanners behave more like virii themselves and you need to pay for the priverlage.
I know the Windows firewall isn't perfect - but as you said it doesn't get in the way too much and ask the user questions every 30 seconds - which for inexperienced users is pretty daunting.
I think Zone Alarms used to be near the top of the pecking order a few years ago but hasn't been up their for a while. I heard Komodo firewall was meant to be pretty good, but I havn't used it extensively.
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