Best of Breed - The Best Freeware for Windows

I am truly amazed and appreciative of the quality that Avast provides to it’s home users free of charge. The Avast suite is a “first class” anti-virus package. I know no better and I’ve seen most. Being an anti-virus vendor, you must establish and continually provide a vigilant relationship with your customer and Avast constantly updates their virus database and they do it as transparently and efficiently as possible for both fee and free customers. I can’t thank Avast enough for the value they provide to us free users consistently. Every home and business user should run Avast. I have no doubt, they are the best, so install their software and put your Virus troubles behind you.

More information from Avast
http://www.avast.com/eng/programs.html

‘Breedlink’=1click download
Breedlink: Download avast! 4 Home Edition FREE Download.

SpyBot Search and Destroy

Spybot is a very popular adware and virus scanner. Spybot is an essential part of any home computer system. The GUI is pretty intuitive so download it, learn what it does, and your computer will benefit. I don’t spend much time protecting my PC from all the crap that is out there. If you take a few precautions (running spybot 1 time a month is one of them) you shouldn’t have any trouble either.

The latest version (1.4) of Spybot has a ‘tea-timer’ which is a process that runs in your system tray and notifies you of any changes to the registry and allows you to approve or deny them. It’s a small process that is worth the cycles. Spybot also ‘immunizes’ your system against a lot of the spycode that is out there. It’s common sense to for any computer connected to the Internet to be running Spybot.

http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html

I decided it was time to take another look at the free firewalls. I found an article on LifeHacker and then an article on ‘Freeware Genius’ (both great ‘Market Sight’ resources) and they led me to a product named Comodo, which I’d never heard of before. I was suspicious but impressed to find a review by PC magazine, which named it as one of the top firewalls (bar none).  The research eventually led me to this report by MatouSec, which lists every firewall in the market, evaluates their performance, and identifies which products are free. I was blown away to find Comodo Firewall Pro, which was tagged as freeware, at the top of the list. That sealed the deal so I downloaded and installed it and now I’m a firm believer in Comodo Firewall Pro. 

It uses about the same amount of resources as Sygate and Zone Labs, so no surprises there, and I was very satisfied with the simple and straight forward GUI they provide.  Now I can say with Confidence that this is the best Firewall on the market, and it’s freeware and that makes it a crucial part of our ‘best of breed’ suite of products.   You can download it at the link below!

http://personalfirewall.comodo.com/

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As a side note, that report by MatouSec also provided a table that included link’s to all the firewall companies it reviewed.

CurrPorts is a great program that lets you see what ports you have open and what they are connected to. I’m running this most of the time, mostly because of my own curiosity rather than any real need. I do think it is a good idea for everyone to keep a tool handy that allows you to see what your computer is connected to and gives you the power to kill any of the connections. Have you ever worried that someone with bad intentions was connected to your computer? CurrPorts will show you what ports are open and if you run it often enough, you’ll be able to identify a connection that is suspicious. CurrPorts gives you the IP address, tells you if the port is TCP or UDP, gives you the path of the process that is running, and it provides other information that will help you investigate an open port. You can shut down any of the ports by right clicking on them and choosing that option. You’ll be surprised how many different connections your computer maintains. I highly recommend that everyone keep CurrPorts on hand and run it sometimes. It’s good to be familiar with everything that you are usually connected to. It will take a while for you to recognize all the connections that are normal. However, Currports does mark a suspicious connection with a pink highlight and it does provide a way to filter the displayed connections. I’m still working to get mine configured well.

Currports does not need to go through an installation process on your computer. Once you download it, it creates a file with a CurrPorts executable. You can put the file anywhere you want (I still put mine in c:\program files) and run it.

Want more information on Currports, see Nirsoft

Download Currports