Best Firewall for P2P?

[ulookingatme]

I was just wandering whether there is a favoured firewall to use for P2P i used to use ZA but lots of people said it wasnt the best for P2P.

I know these types of threads can bring up lots of different names but i just thought there may be one thats chosen more and trouble free then others.

I noticed in Bitdaves speed settings guide he uses 'Kerio Free Version' is the free version good enough or does it need to be registered for full protection?

I quite like the idea of using freeware products when i can but only if there up to the job :)

[The UnUsual Suspect]

I'm sure you will get lots of opinions, but here are my top two.

Sygate (most secure, but can be a pain since it blocked every tiny little process until you allow them)

Mcafee (very easy to use, and almost as secure)

Suspect

[bitdave]

The best firewall to use is a hardware/firmware firewall.

They are relatively cheap from about $25-$100

In combination with a hardware firewall use Windows firewall and you will be secured against remote attacks

The one thing that both of these do not offer is outbound protection

You may want outbound protection if you download a lot of .zip or .rar torrents which may contain a trojan or spyware, or, if you dont want some software you're using to "phone-home"

This is where ZA, Kerio, Mcafee, or Sygate come in

ZA truly is crap for people using p2p. It is a somewhat secure firewall but it cant keep up with p2p traffic, also, since it's so widely used hackers will be trying to exploit it.

The other three are great firewalls and can keep up with p2p traffic.

I like Kerio because it is fairly simple to use, but it also offers more advanced features too

The only thing the paid version offers is ad-blocking and pop-up blocking. If you use Firefox or newer versions of IE then these arent really that much of a problem, so, the free version is all you really need.

I would recommend Kerio over Sygate if you're used to ZA and dont know much about making firewall rules.

PS: While a firewall is great and all it is just as important, possibly more important, to have a good updated antivirus program as well. This is where Mcafee shines, it offers both in one package (at a price though)