eEye Digital Security

 Hello,

 Yesterday I fired up an application that I ordinarily do not use.  In fact I accidentally fired it up this time.  It happens to be Nero Home Essentials SE.  It must use the internet for something but not being familiar with it I'm not sure what.  I plan on familiarizing myself with it one day, in my spare time when I have some.  Anyway, windows firewall popped up a message saying it had disabled certain features for my protection and did I want to allow it or what.  This took me by surprise so I had to read to be certain it was Nero and I was dumb struck that the windows firewall was doing anything anyway.  In the past, Norton, McAfee, Comodo, etc had taken care of settings for windows.  While I was still trying to decide what to choose Blink popped up a message asking if this product should access the internet.  I chose to allow both windows and Blink because I will use Nero eventually.

 My question is, do I have two firewalls running?  Should I manually turn off Windows?

 Thank you,

John

azpilot:

 My question is, do I have two firewalls running?  Should I manually turn off Windows?

It sounds like you have two running, but it does not matter really.  eEye did create Blink to work fine alongside Windows Firewall if you wanted to leave it on.  Is it necessary?  Not really, you really don't need it if you have Blink, but if it makes you feel better having it then by all means continue to leave it on.  I guess if you ever had to temporarily disable Blink for any reason, then the Windows Firewall would be useful in providing you with your basic inbound protection until you reenabled Blink.

 I turned off windows and the security center now reports Blink as both the antivirus and the firewall.  My system is just old and slow enough that I don't need anything doing double duty.  I certainly trust Blink more than MS, that's why I got it in the first place.  I was just a bit confused because I had seen where Blink was reporting as the antivirus before.  The other firewalls I had used in the past turned off MS and turned it back on when I uninstalled them.  So when Blink seemingly handled the antivirus portion I wasn't sure what was going on with the firewall.

I came back in and edited this last reply to mention HOW MUCH FASTER THIS BOX IS NOT THAT THE WINDOWS FIREWALL IS TURNED OFF!  It is absolutely amazing what that did for this old P4, 2 GHz box with 768MB of memory is now.  This old Dell 2350 can not be upgrade to more than 1BG of memory.  I thought that I was just going to have to live with a slower box to have good security.  I thought Blink was simply best for those with quicker machines who wouldn't notice the time and memory it takes to execute the extra code related to security.

 If anyone from Eeye happens to read this, I have no idea if I did something wrong, or if the install just didn't turn off the windows firewall, or if I or something such as Windows Update turned it back on.  But I wonder how many intermediate users who don't know any better such as myself may become disheartened of Blink because of this.

azpilot:

I came back in and edited this last reply to mention HOW MUCH FASTER THIS BOX IS NOT THAT THE WINDOWS FIREWALL IS TURNED OFF!  It is absolutely amazing what that did for this old P4, 2 GHz box with 768MB of memory is now.

Interesting, I wonder if Blink and the Windows Firewall do conflict in such a way on certain systems that was not noted before.  Normally I would not guess such a thing.  How much faster would you say it is?  Are you talking about surfing speeds, starting up applications, or what particular instance of what is faster now? 

 Applications that do not use the internet seem unafffected, such as the current version of Adobe Photoshop Elements, or the software I use to burn CD's and DVD's.  It is mostly surfing.  I use FF 3 with 10 addons.  Things like WOT, Noscript, adblock and filterset G, download status bar, cookie culler and Foxmarks.  Startup time for FF was about 30 seconds, down now to about 10.  I think that is mostly due to FF checking for updates and all the addons too.  While using the browser for Gmail, Yahoo mail, and many sites that I frequent regularly that I am very accustomed to the load times consume at least half the wall clock time.  Boot time is reduced also but I cant really say how much.  It used to take so long that I had learned to anticipate when I was going to use the PC then go away and come back later when I was ready to start.  Waiting for reboots when I install software or things like Windows Update were painful.  It's at least half of what it used to be, maybe more.

 I don't really have the expertise to say why this is, if I have to guess it would be memory constraints.  I have two systems, both Dells (different models though) and fairly old with 2GHz processors, slower FSB and memory speeds than we see in new machines this year.  But the kids PC, which also had both Blink and WFW running did not seem to be nearly as affected.  They run mostly the same software but they use IE.  I mostly use IE on that machine too since I'm doing windows updates or some other admin type maint on that box and it's about all I do there.  There is a noticable improvement on the kids box but not nearly as dramatic.  The difference that I can see is the kids PC has 2GB of memory where mine is 768MB, so I assume that memory plays a large part in the problems I experienced on my box.