An Outbound Firewall
After installing antivirus software, many people replace the Windows XP firewall with a third-party firewall to regulate outbound traffic. This strategy can stop malware that has already invaded your PC from sending stolen data to a crook, but even free ones come at a price: You'll almost always have to deal with some annoying pop-ups when a new, unknown (to the firewall) program attempts to connect to the Internet.
Still, if you're willing to tolerate the pop-ups, outbound blocking can provide good protection. To get it, we chose Online Armor Personal Firewall Free. Though there aren't any universally accepted firewall tests, Online Armor did well in the extensive Firewall Challenge by Matousec.com, a security testing group. This program is also easier to use than many other free firewalls.
Look at both the program name and its location to decide if you want Online Armor to allow it to connect to the Internet.After going through the installation and Safety Check, right-click the OA system-tray icon and deselect Program Guard; that feature, when running, will display pop-ups for every new program that you attempt to install or run, instead of just the apps that attempt to connect to the Internet. For us, the huge annoyance wasn't worth it.
Online Armor does not work with Vista. But you can enable the Vista firewall's outbound blocking (it's turned off by default) with the free Vista Firewall Control.
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