[shaygate]

After a few years using Windows Xp home and Pro I have now got a new laptop with Windows Vista on it, as a matter of course I have installed an Anti Virus and was going to install a thrid party firewall. Now I have been using Sygate's personal firewall on a few different macjines and I really like it but Vista tells me there are compatibility issues, so I stopped that installation and tried ZoneAlarm which I don't like as much but have also used in the past. On trying to install that it told me that it also wasn't compatible with vista and aborted the install.

So my question is really, with Windows defender in and working do I need a thrid party firewall and if I do which would you suggest ? bearing in mind i like the price of ZoneAlarm and Sygate i.e. nothing

[DaveA]

We use free ZoneAlarm on one of our laptops. You must down load it from to the Vista machine, as the download program reads your OS type and downloads the correct version.

I assume that you uninstalled ALL of the "Trial" versions of protections that came with this machine?

[shaygate]

Thanks for the quick reply, I love this forum !

As for uninstalling the preloaded trial stuff, well its a sad story. The laptop actualy belongs to my friends dad and he asked me to 'get it ready to use' We live in the UK and and laptop prices in US $ are cheap in UK £'s so they bought this machine in Florida last year when they were on holiday. They thought they were buying an Acer Aspire 5570 machine and thats what the shop showed them, my friends dad asked them to install XP instaead of Vista as that was what he was used to (and paid them another $60) , anyway and left the machine with them for a day and collected the next day. Now it goes without saying he doesn't know a thing about computers and was at the mercy of these crooks. The machine he collected turned out to be a 3680 with 5570 stickers on the case. (Basicly its half the machine 80gb HD instaed of 160, 512 Ram instaed of 1 Gb and only one celeron instaed of a duel core you get the picture)
They had tweeked the settings of vista so it looked like XP on the surface and for some bizzare reason had deleted all of the Acer software, All it had on was a copy of Vista basic which I had to activate !

So make an even longer story short I have spent a few hours downloading the right stuff from Acer and am only now getting to the end, the laptiop is an Ok machine but not what he paid for, i guess they thought, rightly as it turned out, he wouldn't know any different or even use the machine until he got back to the UK and he's hardly likely to take it back is he !?