Nick Bradbury just put a great post on his blog titled Why do firewalls have to be such a PITA? Right, software firewalls are generally a serious pain, and so are “security suites”.

The problem with all software firewalls on XP and before is that they need to patch the Windows kernel to work. Most of the “security suites” also do this for many of their other functions. Why? Because they can. Do you want to work on a machine with a kernel patched by some third-party company, for their own aims? I didn’t think so.

The 64-bit version of Vista will allegedly have kernel patch protection (PatchGuard) but this too won’t be a real deterrent until they link it to a hardware lock.

My Windows computers have all been working better than ever since I banned all Symantec programs and third-party software firewalls from them several years ago. I now use a hardware firewall and careful computing and I’ve never looked back since.

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