Comodo Personal Firewall v3

For the purposes of this test we were lucky enough to get our hands on the very latest version of Comodo, which, at the time of writing, was still undergoing tweaking but should just be ready by the time you read this.

Comodo put on an impressive performance, withstanding anything that Shields Up could throw at it and blitzing the Atelier Web tests with a 70 per cent success rate. Most rival firewalls ask for permission each time a program tries to connect to the internet: this latest version of Comodo also asks you to OK programs that are launching, saving files and accessing other programs too. This makes it extremely secure but asks a lot of the user and takes some serious setting up.

The main screen offers a simple, at-a-glance view of what’s happening but you need to dig deeper to get into the basic settings while the program’s structure isn’t particularly easy to navigate around.

There’s no easy route in to this firewall but if you’re willing to spend time familiarising yourself with the configuration and navigation, it will reward you with the best free coverage that you can get for both Windows XP and Vista.

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