atw: Symantec takes over Sygate, killing off Personal Firewall.

Hi fellow Austechwriters,

Just so you know, access to the Sygate Personal Firewall
(SPF) freeware home version & the paid Pro version, which I
used to recommend highly to you and am using right now has
been killed off in favour of promoting the equivalent
Symantec "Norton" Internet security products.

To quote from the Sygate Web site:
"Important Notice: Effective November 30th, 2005 all Sygate
personal firewall products will be discontinued. This does
not affect Sygate's Enterprise firewall and endpoint
compliance products, which will still be updated and
supported."

Mind you, the version of SPF available recently from
<http://smb.sygate.com/products/spf/spf_ov.htm> did not
like being installed and hung on startup on my new WinDoze
XP Home PC.

Whilst I actually do like some Symantec software, such as
their very capable and quite intuitive to use WinFax Pro
faxing software, I have no experience of their firewalls
to recommend them or otherwise.

My experience of their slow, resource hungry and bloated
Norton Antivirus product that never seems to actually
remove viruses but just keeps all the files hanging
around, "quarantined" by the software (IMNSHO a very
disturbing, highly fallible and rather space-wasteful
approach) has not been a good one.

On the antivirus side of things, I can still highly
recommend Vet antivirus (Australian made, even though now
overseas owned) which has been absolutely marvellous of
late with frequent updates that append the virus signature
file instead of downloading the entire file as it used to
do, making it the choice (along with Grisoft's AVG) for
dialup Internet users. Both Vet (from www.vet.com.au)and
AVG (freeware home and paid commercial versions available
from www.grisoft.com).  Have proven to be very effective
and not at all resource hungry (doesn't seem to slow
down your PC at all).  I have only encountered problems
with AVG using WinDoze 98 SE, due to the DOS utility that
it embeds to run before startup, but it works fine on XP.

Well, enough said for first thing on a Monday morning.

Hope that helped in some small way.

Regards,

Michael


-- 
Michael Granat
Write Ideas*
Carnegie, Victoria, Australia.
E-mail:         writeideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Web:            www.writeideas.com.au

*Trading As business #0828673K
Registered (1987) Corporate Affairs Victoria

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