Sygate Personal Firewall

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Manufacturer: Sygate
Price: $19.95 -- free for personal use
Requirements: Windows family including W2K and NT
Web Site: SYGATE

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DO YOU NEED A FIREWALL if you're running a system from your home? I'd say emphatically that you do and that the increasing tendency of software developers to send your "home" information to some vast repository of data somewhere is as convincing a reason to do so now as the fear of attack from outside.

FEATURES
Sygate offers a range of different firewall products with its Personal Firewall Product effectively free if you're only using it for personal or home use.

The next step up from this useful little product is Personal Firewall Pro, which claims to give more protection for your system and which only costs $39.95.

Even if use the "free" product at home, it will open your eyes to what's going on on your "personal" computer these days - the more so if you're running Windows XP.

Sygate has a Web page here which scans your systems and which might well be worth clicking on to see what "they" know about you. This page will scan for Trojans and a number other possible security holes.

We're using Windows XP here, not because we fancy the Eyecandy - indeed it took us a while to make our desktop look like the ole 98SE one we didn't love but had got used to -- but because the latest machine we're running came installed with it, like most machines these days.

When you install the product, it sets itself up for all the applications you might use to access the Web - you can choose whether to ignore messages that XP, for example, sends to Microsoft, or you can choose whether to accept or reject those sends when they arise.

Can you "trust" Microsoft with information about your computer? Well, I dunno, but choosing whether or not to send messages to Palatinate Redmondia with XP is really an eye opener.

After installation, the Sygate logo shows up as a little icon on your task bar, but if you want, you can set it to get all the klaxons and sirens going if something is coming in that might be undesirable.

XP routinely tries to send info to Microsoft HQ on XP startup, when you run "search", when your run Media Player, Windows Messenger and on many other occasions, like for example when you boot up Explorer, Outlook, FTP programmes and otherwise.

More worryingly, it appears to us, it ain't just Microsoft that's sending info back to its HQ. So far, we've noted that the BackUP software we wrote about yesterday wants to tell Veritas you're there, Real Networks does a passable imitation of the XP OS by shuffling data off to its HQ at regular intervals, and even our HP Precision Scanner seems to want to tell Carly Fiorina that we're using her software.

Why?

The window shown here is the basic console for Sygate Personal Firewall. It allows you to view running applications, view applications and connection details, enable or disable certain services, and view logs of incoming activity.

You can also choose on this limited free version the ability to block all traffic, operate at a normal level, or operate at a reduced level.

EASE OF USE
There's no great obstacle to installing or learning how to use this cut down utility. If you want to explore the whys and wherefores of firewalls, this limited version probably won't help you very much.

There aren't many options to select or deselect, and once you've set it up, you can ignore the fact that it's there until you get those little messages saying that Redmond wants to know something about your PC or not.

CONCLUSION
We don't want to whip up latent paranoia in people. No doubt there are people who spend most of their waking hours playing about probing other people's systems and vulnerabilities, but whether most ordinary folk need to think about this is debatable.

Still, if you've got a DSL or cable line and your machine is on most of the time, we think that a firewall is perhaps a little like a smoke detector in a house - hopefully never needed but there just in case the conflagration starts. A bit like those safety curtains we used to see in theatres when we were a kid. They used to be made out of asbestos but that's a different tale...

And as we've said, if you're a personal/home user, this particular smoke detector costs nothing apart from download time.

We didn't think when we installed it we'd be more interested in the info our PC was sending out, but that seems to be the shape of things to come...

INQUIRER SCORE
Useabilty 7/10, Value for money 10/10, Features 5/10, Wow factor 6/10, Documentation/support (Web based) 6/10. Total 34/50.