AtGuard
A legally free "Norton Personal Firewall" clone !.

Attn: This topic is a bit outdated . I've never tested this program under Win2K or WinXP (althought some people report it's OK) .  A good freeware firewall today with similar features is Agnitum Outpost 1.0 .

 AtGuard was a great successful firewall from WRQ . At 1999 Symantec bought the sources & copyright of AtGuard and with some small modifications made the "Norton Personal Firewall" & "Norton Internet Security" product lines . AtGuard is discontinued & WRQ's sites does not even mention anything about the existence of AtGuard . The similarities of the two products are obvious: Identical filenames , menus & GUI . 

The interesting point is that AtGuard was not promoted as a firewall application but as an ad-banner filter . Like the well known NIS (NPF does NOT support this) , AtGuard can catch & filter all the useless banner links . Also when an animated gif is going to be loaded it permits only the first frame to be loaded . This means a significant gain in your connection speed since most of useless data are not passing through your modem .

None is interesting anymore about the copyright of AtGuard , but AtGuard is light & fast . The install file is just 1.4MB as oppose to NPF (12 MB) & NIS (38 MB) . Looks fast , acts fast even on my 486/100 . The only disadvantage is that even it's latest version (3.22) , was a "preliminary" version for Win2K . 

Actually I like AtGuard more than the BIG & FAT Symantec products !. You can get it from various sites: Ftp Search for atguard32 or atguard it for a beginning !.

Regards
M.H.