Now that Microsoft has strengthened the firewall in Windows Xp with the latest service pack, I am wondering if I can ditch my other firewall (Sygate)?

Symantec claims "The Windows Firewall is designed to monitor and control inbound network traffic only"

Source : http://www.symantec.com/techsupp/sp2...&tpre=us&tdir=

I guess I thought the sp2 firewall was supposed to monitor both incoming and outgoing? Anyway, are you guys going to keep your existing firewalls or are they now obsolete? I like to run only the programs that I really need.

MNKid

Sheesh, if it doesn't do outfoing theen what is the point? Gonna keep the old stuff til I find out. You sure "SP2 doesn't block outgoing?

I know that it's blocking FlashFXP to connect :(

I have to add it manually in the firewall rules :)

Like I said, I thought all along that is supposed to monitor outgoing, but Symantec says otherwise. Maybe just ther "spin" or more likely a bald-faced lie to keep people from bailing on their firewall.

When a new program attempts to connect to the internet for the first time it asks wether to block or allow it- so it must be monitoring outbound connections as well.

XP firewall - better than before but not good enough. A third opinion here:
In short ZDNet claims the XP SP2 firewall isn't as good as your third-party "real" firewall.

No surprise, really. I do like the confomt of an good firewall, and unlike most of you, continue to prefer Norton Personal Firewall.

i have been testing the sp2 firewall on one of my pc and it's not that great it does have outbond protection but it does not detect every application that try to connect.
for example i can use adware and spybot to update the spyware definition without xp firewall even doing anything about it .

I'll stick to Sygate and my Router for my workstation.
I think the new firewall is better than before but is long way from good

Sony

Thanks for the views. Think I'll stick with Sygate for now. Even the free version sounds better than the windows one in sp2. Too bad, sort of had my hopes up that microsoft would come through. Seems like they went from half a firewall to 3 quarters of a firewall. Still not detecting all outgoing activity, apparently. And here I thought they were starting to get serious about security. Guess I bought into the hype.

As a test, I had both acrobat and realplayer check for updates, and the windows firewall says nothing. I like it when I am notified, at least the first time, any app tries to access the internet. I don't like programs 'phoning home' without my knowledge, so I am a bit bummed out.

I'm no expert, but am I missing something here? Is there a way to make sure every online attempt by every program brings up an alert with the new firewall?

MNKid

@MinnesotaKid - your post got me worried so I thought I would install Norton's NIS - during the install a message popped up telling me to forget about MS's firewall and use Norton's. I don't believe that used to happen with MS's firewall. so you might be right in installing Sygate.