Sygate Personal Firewall

Like many of the products tested in this group test Sygate comes in both free and paid-for versions; we've reviewed Sygate Personal Firewall Standard, the free version, to see what sort of facilities you can expect if you don't want to spend any money or use the built-inWindows XP firewall. If you have a network, there's a small network version too, for three users.

Installation is simple, though on the reboot we had lots of pop-up messages before we'd even reached the registration screen, which was a little confusing. Like Outpost, the pop-up boxes are standard application-style windows - they're not terribly attentiongrabbing. They do include lots of information; click for details and you can even see a dump of the network packet that triggered the alert - techy heaven.

The main console shows a graph of network activity, with the icons of running applications - you can hideWindows services - and, optionally, messages at the bottom of the screen.

By default, sharing on our network was blocked with an error message relating to ntoskrnl.exe, but it was pretty simple to re-enable sharing.

There's even an option to block traffic to or from the local network when your computer's screensaver kicks in. There's plenty of scope for creating rules; and you can schedule them, so you could open access through the firewall at certain times, for example. As well as the usual IP address and subnets, you can even make rules based on MAC address - handy if you use DHCP and want to block a specific computer, regardless of which IP address it has today. Also, this is the only product we tested that works onWindows 95, albeit only OSR2 and later.

For a free product, there's an exceptionally powerful range of tools here - with even more in the paid-for version. Our only concern is the interface, which won't suit novices.

Contact: Sygate
http://smb.sygate.com

System requirements:

• Windows 95(OSR2, 2.5)/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP
• Pentium 133MHz
• 10MB of free hard disk space
• 32MB of memory
• IE 5

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