Vista Firewall Sucks:

I decided to replace my desktop computer, and with that I upgraded my OS from XP to Vista. I figured Windows Vista would have a much deeper much more customizeable firewall than XP does, well simply because it is newer. After digging around the anser is no, it doesn’t.

Why does Windows Vista have a horrible firewall?

Because the only way to have control over outgoing internet access is through very hidden feature set group policy editor and set up some rules and filters for outgoing traffic.

Why is controling outbound traffic important?

Because if malware does infect your computer, it can find sensitive data about you, and transmit this data over the internet. The problem is that you may have some trojan horse or something on your computer sending this info everyday, and you would have no way of ever knowing.

I highly recommend using Zone Alarm’s free firewall, or you can go to my tools page where I feature all free and very usefull programs. It has deep control over all internet communication, and you can control which programs are permitted to access the internet and which ones aren’t. It takes a little more work in the beginning, because you have to configure everything, but once you get it going you will be much better off.