How did I come to find the wonderful set of utilities Downloadable for free over at Comodo.com? What are these utilities? Well they are in no particular order A firewall, an antivirus, a backup util and so many more all free. Why you ask? Well the company Comodo, sells SSL certificates to websites. They figure if people feel safe being online then people will spend more money, spending money at web retailers means they need SSL certs, which aren’t cheap. How do you figure into this? Well Comodo decided to release a fully functional professional level, even enterprise level secure set of utilities to the public for free, to foster just such a safe environment.
The firewall? Works like a charm, clean, efficient and lightweight. It doesn’t slow your machine down at all. It asks when things seem out of the ordinary and explains what you might need to know very clearly. Everything i own worked with this application with minimal fuss. It is a joy to work with.
Don’t Think of this article as a review… More of an introduction. The review will come later. Suffice it to say this is a winner I couldn’t keep under wraps.
How did I come to find these utilities?
I’m a man of modest means. I have a small cute house, a loving wife and a very tiny little dust devil of a son. I do not have money to blow on frivolous things like antivirus, anti-spyware, anti-spam, anti-fun products. I barely, if ever, have money to blow on video games, and I like playing with them. It is in this spirit that i had been using Zone Alarm free edition for a very long time. I recommended toy to friends colleges and clients alike. It did the job very well and produced very minimal headaches. Zone alarm has been slowing down over the ears as the feature rot has slowly crept in. An Anti phishing tool, a spayware, an antivirus service all being sold. And the limited functionality of the free product was diminishing by the day. I’m not opposed to paying people for their hard work in writing good software, but don’t tell me its free then take out the creamy filling, thats just dirty pool.
About 6 months ago I received a PocketPC, I love these gadgets but Zone Alarm required me to either buy the full version of their software, or disable the firewall every time I wanted to hook in my Axim. Unacceptable, this wasn’t a network appliance this was a peripheral. So the hunt began. I found this set of utilities listed on all of the IT guy wish lists, all of the people who worked deep within the bowels of geekdom love these utilities. So far I’ve only used the firewall and the antispyware. Both work like a charm, and have been doing so for 6 months. I’ll be testing out the rest of the utilities and reviewing them. Up until that time please feel free to leave your feedback on what you see.