Lavasoft Personal Firewall Review

Review summary

Good points

Bad points

Our verdict

Lavasoft Personal Firewall was clearly designed for home users. This is not a bad thing, though. While it is incredibly simple and easy to use, it is also incredibly effective, and its firewall capabilities should be more than adequate for personal computers.

Full review

Lavasoft claims that its personal firewall manages to shield computers from malicious net-based attacks while remaining easy to use and uncomplicated. To find out whether or not most users would agree with these claims, we installed Lavasoft Personal Firewall and spent some time testing it out.

Setup

Lavasoft Personal Firewall works with most versions of Windows, including 64-bit versions. Unfortunately, however, it does not currently support Windows 7. Those who have a system with at least 256MB of memory and one of the earlier Windows versions should have no issues installing Lavasoft Personal Firewall.

On our test system, the firewall's installation completed without any problems. While installing, it automatically detected our anti-virus software. The firewall then synchronized its settings with the anti-virus software to prevent potential conflicts. From start to finish, getting Lavasoft Personal Firewall installed and running took only a few minutes.

Firewall

Lavasoft Personal Firewall works to effectively protect users' systems in a variety of ways. First, it controls both inbound and outbound traffic, ensuring that nothing malicious is able to get in or out of users' networks. Also, with its excellent host-protection features, this firewall actively seeks and blocks attempts to compromise users' data.

Like many other personal firewalls, Lavasoft Personal Firewall can also be used to control programs' network access. When unknown programs attempt to send or receive information through the network, the firewall will alert users. Once alerted, users can choose whether or not to grant network access to these unknown programs. With the automatic-exceptions feature enabled, well-known programs, such as Skype and Internet Explorer, are automatically granted network access.

Security

While it lacks many of the additional security features offered by competing products, Lavasoft Personal Firewall provides users with the information needed to keep their systems secure. Its network-activity monitoring prevents unauthorized connections between users' systems and the Internet from going unnoticed. Also, this software includes a log viewer that allows users to review the history of all blocked network activity, including incoming and outgoing connections.

System performance

Lavasoft Personal Firewall is a fairly lightweight program. Since it uses only minimal resources, we did not notice a drop in our system's performance while this firewall was running.

Features

Entertainment mode – This mode provides complete protection in a hassle-free manner. While in this mode, the firewall will run silently in the background so that users can concentrate on their games and movies without distractions.

Multilingual support – Lavasoft Personal Firewall supports a variety of different languages, including English, French, German, and Spanish.

Web control – This handy feature is capable of blocking unsafe websites and providing users with the ability to browse the web anonymously.

Self protection – This feature prevents web-based attacks from deactivating the firewall and gaining access to users' computers.

Ease of use

Designed for home users, Lavasoft Personal Firewall is one of the easiest firewalls to use. Its interface is clean, simple, and easy to navigate through. This software's features are labeled and described in a manner that most users will have no difficulty understanding. Also, since Lavasoft Personal Firewall features an auto-learning mode, it is capable of managing most network traffic without bombarding users with annoying pop-up messages.

Help & support

Lavasoft's website does feature a fairly large support section. Unfortunately, the majority of the support information included there is intended for other Lavasoft products, such as Ad-Aware. Still, there is some useful information on the Lavasoft website that is intended for users of their personal-firewall software. For instance, there is a link to the firewall's manual, and the website also features a firewall-related FAQ. If customers need additional support, they are encouraged to contact Lavasoft's support staff via e-mail or live chat.

Overall

For the most part, we were really impressed with Lavasoft Personal Firewall. It manages to provide users with comprehensive network security in an uncomplicated manner. It is so easy to use, in fact, that most novices should have no trouble utilizing this firewall effectively. Also, since it uses only minimal resources, even old, weak computers should be able to run Lavasoft Personal Firewall with ease. Unfortunately, though, because of the fact that this software does not support the latest Windows OS, Windows 7 users will need to look elsewhere for a personal firewall.

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Overall
Setup
Firewall
Security
System performance
Features
Ease of use
Help & support