Firewalls

Recently a friend asked me about his Norton firewall and XP. His system was running slow and hanging up for some reason. Well computers can cause many different problems and sympthoms, so I pondered and questioned him.

Remebering from my Cisco class, there are 2 types of firewalls (Hardware - like routers) and (software - like Norton, Mcafee). Well there is a difference. Firstly software firewalls have to load with other software running in the background. This loads the system down and can cause it to run very slowly. Hadware firewalls just sit there connected to (back or front) of your computer and respond accordingly - no heavy loading.

Now we add XP with a built in firewall and hey we got a lotta sofware running before we opened a program. Well the beauty of XP is that it has a built in firewall which protects the system. Well if XP has a firewall built in, then why try to install another one. It doesn,t make sense.
Here is a Microsoft excerp on turning on and off XP firewall :

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=283673


Start up files are problems too. Have you recently installed some software and found your system running slow, well I have an old Windows 98 box thats slowed down. Once I began to check the startup files, I found Windows was starting a lotta files on reboot. How did I check this, by pressing (crtl-Alt-Del), the startup files box should appear. There is only so much memory available for these files-when its low, the system starts slowing down considerably.

Heres what Microsoft says about Windows 98 troubleshooting startup files:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q188867

Starup files Info:
http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_index.htm

You can click on certain files and cancel them to get familiar what controls what, however it takes some time to get familiar with what your looking at.

1. Let say you bought a new printer and installed the software, then there may be files added to the starup folder to launch the printer on startup.

2. Lets say you installed a new widget or application, well there is probably a file added to the startup folder, which activates the application on startup.

Get the idea. Software installations do things we don,t know about. Gotta problem - email me

Hope this helps
G jackson
A+,Network+,MCP-NT,MCP-2000,MCSA-2000,MCSE-2000,2000 Exchange Certified