ISS Black Ice PC Protection

Black Ice is a long established name in the personal firewall arena and, for a long time, was highly recommended by people online. The latest version, 3.66, adds the 'application protection' facility offered by many applications; that is, the ability to intervene when a program attempts to access the net. Black Ice goes further and will intervene for any unknown application, including installers. But an 'installation mode' can turn this off, popping up a reminder from time to time, and scanning the system to spot new files once you?ve finished.

That scanning can take a while - on our installation, it took 11 minutes initially, and about four minutes after starting then aborting a setup. Another area where Black Ice differs from the competition is alerts. There are no pop-up alerts - instead, the shield icon in the system tray flashes to let you know something is happening. Double-click and the main application window opens, and that's where it gets complicated.

Essentially, Black Ice is in dire need of an interface update. There are three tabs - Events, Intruders and History. Click on an item in the Events tab and you'll be taken to the Intruder tab, which may show a little more information about the other computer, but not much. The history tab is simply graphs showing activity. The settings are in a single, multi-tabbed window, also needing an overhaul with information; for file sharing to work on the Lan, we had to tick 'Allow Internet file sharing', and 'Allow Netbios Neighborhood' which means browsing the network.

There is a good range of options, including the ability to temporarily block a remote system for a specific time, or accept all connections from another PC. But overall, this is a reasonable firewall that's let down by a 1990s interface and which lacks some of the flexible options of the competition.

Contact: Internet Security Systems
http://blackice.iss.net

System requirements:
Windows 98/ME/XP/2000 Pro/NT4Workstation

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