I refer to your reply to a letter from Judith W about firewalls that was published on 10th June. Of particular interest are your comments on broadband connections and firewalls, since I have recently joined up with TransAct. I have a Pentium 4 running Windows XP and noticed that your reply did not mention that XP comes with its own firewall. I have activated the XP firewall and I am also running Norton Antivirus 2002. Given this, would you still advise me to install ZoneAlarm? If I do, should I uninstall the XP firewall before installing ZoneAlarm? And would ZoneAlarm interfere in any way with Norton, or vice versa?

Thank you for writing in about the Windows XP inbuilt firewall. This is a feature of Windows XP which many users aren’t aware of. The ICF (Internet Connection Firewall) also comes with Windows XP Home Edition. Probably the most significant difference between the Windows XP firewall and ZoneAlarm is that the Windows XP firewall helps prevent unauthorised persons from accessing your computer. However, it doesn’t stop applications (unbeknown to the user) on the users computer from accessing the internet (e.g., when some spyware programs ‘phone home’). When an application wishes to access the internet, ZoneAlarm prompts the user to allow or deny the program access. Having said this, it is always a good idea to have as much security as possible without significantly compromising functionality for the user. When running the Windows XP ICF, ZoneAlarm, and Norton Antivirus 2002 concurrently, I have experienced no problems.