Agnitum鈥檚 Outpost Firewall, one of the best firewall programs for Windows, now exists in a free version (minus some features of the Pro version, of course, but it鈥檚 still a damn good deal – ten times better than ZoneAlarm and about two-point-seven times better than Comodo).
Features include:
Bidirectional firewall 路 Protection that can鈥檛 be shut down by hackers 路 Application behavior monitoring 路 Intuitive, resource-friendly operation 路 Activity monitoring capabilities 路 Windows Vista and 64-bit compatibility
Get it from http://free.agnitum.com/ or http://www.firewallforfree.com.
STOP PRESS! (yeah, four days after it鈥檚 already been to press. sigh.) Anyway, I have a rule for myself where I won鈥檛 erase previous posts, but I need to modify this one as follows. Stupidly I went ga-ga about the software before I discovered the limitations of the free version. You can鈥檛 click on any connections and do anything with them, like terminate them etc. The per-connection context menu is completely disabled in the free version, essentially making the firewall read-only! This is pathetic and makes it next to useless as far as I鈥檓 concerned, like a viruskiller that doesn鈥檛 clean virii. I hereby retract what I said about this tool and advise my readers to go back to Comodo until I find something better. I still stand by what I say re the full version of Outpost though. Just not this version.