Suggestion for a good firewall

[yankeeDDL]

Hi, I'm looking for a good firewall for personal use.
I'm not looking for a fortress: I don't expect to venture on "dangerous" territories but I got burned in the past using Internet Explorer while searching for lyrics.
I switched to Firefox (and wish I had done it sooner) and had no problem since, but after the troubles I had to go through to remove those spywares I'd rather be on the safe side.
I have an antivirus but I want to be ceratin that nothing goes in or out of the computer without my approval.

Any suggestions?

 

[pscowboy]

Zone Alarm works great from my experience.

Put yourself behind a router, ZA, and use Mozilla (instead of IE), and I believe it would be rare you'll ever be troubled with malware.

 

[177ine177ine]

firefox for sure, zone alarm is also good, but u gutta set it up properly otherwise it'll block a lot of things it's not suppose 2

 

[Jake_Barnes]

Put yourself behind a router, ZA, and use Mozilla (instead of IE), and I believe it would be rare you'll ever be troubled with malware.

Excellent advice. I use that set up plus Avast, Spybot, SpywareBlaster (passive - registry blocker), Counter Spy & Spysweeper as a scanner only.

I never come up with anything.

 

[ProdigyMS]

I always liked Sygate Personal Pro Firewall...

 

[yankeeDDL]

Thank you. I've been trying ZoneAlarm for the past few days now and seems to be working fine.
I used a similar firewal few years ago (can't remember the name now): very easy to use.
I still haven't figure out how to read all th einfo though: I see that 3 inbound attempt have been blocked. I'm curious abot them but I've found no way to determine where/when/from who where these attempts made.

 

[kittle]

Actually the best firewall for your money is a router.

Dont have to worry about stuff getting in thats not supposed to. almost no setup required (other than changing the default password).

ZoneAlarm may be free - but from what ive seen on other forms (especially with games) - you get what you pay for.

 

[yankeeDDL]

I've actually had problems at work with ZoneAlarm: it seems to be stopping more than it needs to.
Here's my problem: twice (as in 2 times) I got some spamware crap while searching for lyrics. Once was for "Raindrops keep falling on my head". I won't forget that: so many popups started showing up that the PC got so slow I could not even see them. I wonder what were they trying to do ... cause it ain't advertisement.
Did I mentioned? McAfee (up to date) crashed the moment IE loaded that page.
Because I do use Anti Virus too, in case you wondered.
Did I mentioned it was my laptop from work?

At home I have a wireless router. Does it fall in the category of routers that help preventing this from happening? It's a Netgear MVR814 v2.