Comodo Free Firewall Review

I have recently been looking into free PC security options as in the past I have found for home use, these are normally more than good enough to do the job and they are often lighter on system resource usage than the paid security suites. After reading various review and advice sites, I decided to give Comodo Firewall a go. Initially all seemed good and it seemed to be holding true to the reviews I had read for the first 2 days and in fact, the latest version was far less annoying with pop ups than all the reviews had suggested it would be. I'll come back to what happened after the first 2 days later.
So lets cover the good points first. It was really fast to load on start up and windows 7 was loading faster from the login point than previously which was nice.
It downloaded updates quickly and efficiently as some firewall providers out there can have quite slow updates, probably due to not enough server weight to through around to their customers.
The interface as quite nicely laid out and easy to navigate. It has nice friendly slide bars to set the level of security/aggressiveness the fire provides against the outside world getting in and your programs getting out. This was something I did like as it's makes it easier for the more novice user out there to use but for the more technical or paranoid user, you can dig into the setup to further customise how you want it to respond and work.
It also has some nice features that Comodo make a point of marketing. I specifically like the sandbox idea where you can run programs you are unsure about in an environment where they can't run wild destroying your registry. Unfortunately, if Comodo firewall deemed a safe program as unsure, it would also shove them in the sandbox. I found this with my razor lycosa app, perfectly safe tool for my peripheral but Comodo was flagging it as a potential risk and off to the sandbox. From the reviews I read, Comodo Firewall does have a habit of flagging up false positives quite often but once you tell it on the pop ups that the safe stuff us safe and tell it to remember it wont do it again.
Another good point is when checking on task manager, Comodo doesn't use up much system resource at all, in fact it was one of the lowest running services on the list when sorted by usage.
So you are probably thinking so far so good and maybe I'll check out comodo's website but what happened after the first 2 days of use mentioned earlier? Well essentially it rendered windows unusable. I did look into what the cause could have been after seeing so many positive reviews and it seems there are a load of people out there who have had this problem. I'm sure there are even more people out there who are using Comodo's firewall without any problems at all otherwise they wouldn't be in business. In any case, from what I found there is a problem with some of the .cav files that result in 99% of your processor time being eaten up. I did try to run the uninstaller after a hard reset as fir the first couple of mins the system was running normally. Unfortunately the bug kicked in and the system ground to a halt. This killed off the uninstaller making Comodo removable even in safe mode. Just to mention at this point if you do try Comodo and get this problem, reboot to safe mode and it should uninstall ok as safe mode runs fine. I would strongly advise setting a system restore point before installing comodo's software though as I needed to restore to get my PC working again. So uninstaller broken, I found a link on Comodo's forums to a batch file that would clean Comodo from my system and registry. Downloaded and use sticked it across to my PC. Run from safe mode following the guide it came with and all looked good until a reboot back into windows. Comodo was gone and the CPU usage bug was gone but it killed another part of my registry or network card drivers resulting in a resort to using a restore point. I was skeptical to do the restore due to have little success with them under win XP, hence the reason for looking for and trying the alternative options but it seems either win7 is better at restoring or I got lucky. I can only assume that Comodo has a conflict issue with certain system configurations and mine happened to be one of those.

So in conclusion, if you are able to use Comodo successfully with your system configuration then I would say it's worth a look as it does appear to be a good firewall with some good features but just make sure you set a restore point before you install.


Veiledbunneh

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