Whatever you need for the Internet, take a look below. Get a
firewall to protect yourself against the deviants of the world, find a
chat client to talk to your friends with (cough Trillian cough). As
with all things, the Internet is a changing place, so come back once in a
while to see if anything new and exciting has appeared.
Trillian is the answer to your chatting woes if you
have friends on AIM, Microsoft Messenger, and Yahoo. Let's not
forget IRC and the venerable ICQ. Not only does it connect to all
these mediums, but it's fully skinnable, and supports a TON of features.
Freeware - but it was so good I donated!
There is also a Pro version - and believe me, the plug-ins alone make
it worth ponying up for. Since I was an early donater, this copy
was gratis - how's that for cool?
A popular firewall. The free version does
everything the average person needs. There's a for-fee
Pro version, which is even better. For XP users, disable the
built-in firewall and go with this - much easier to understand and
configure.
I am not happy with ZoneAlarm 3's User Interface, and I
have had some stability issues with it under Windows 2000 and XP.
Like ZoneAlarm, there is a free and a fee version.
I was using Outpost until I discovered a bug that crops up with high
speed connections. It's hard to find documentation on this problem
and even harder to fix, although searching for "memory leak" at
Agnitum's website will turn up the answer.
This little firewall is kinda ugly and not real easy to use, but I
like the rules that it allows you to create. I think it will
eventually mature a bit and it's been very, very stable where ZA was
not.
Not as pretty as ZoneAlarm. Not quite as buggy as
Agnitum. This is my new choice despite the fact that it's hard to
understand some of the settings - but let's face it folks, this is nitty
gritty stuff and making it sound easy isn't, erm, that easy to do.