Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not flashy, not easy to use, but it WORKS., 2 Jan 2004
Edit: You shouldn't be looking at this if you want a firewall product in 2007. Look for something by Agnitum, Sunbelt or Sygate. The original review below still applies, but this version of Black Ice is outdated and not recommended.
Actually, don't let my title deceive you too much, Black ICE is a powerful piece of software which does its job very well, without needing to take over your PC (glares at Norton).
BlackICE is a firewall, plain and simple. It logs any attempts at intrusion, and prevents as little or as much of it as you wish (setting "protection level" in settings to anything from "trusting - allow all" to "paranoid - block all unsolicited incoming traffic"). You can allow certain addresses temporary or permanent access to your computer (very useful for home networks), and - should you require this - you can use BlackICE's in-built "application protection" to keep track of which applications on your computer are, and more importantly, can or can't access the internet.
Norton tends to take over PCs it is installed on - i.e. it installs slow, bulky, memory-hogging services and uses equally slow and memory-hogging interfaces that supposedly make it easy to set up. I would argue that this is not the case, and - as long as you are prepared to take some time to read through the manual and play around with it - Black ICE is not only a far more immediate program, but faster and eventually easier to work with.
Finally, whereas Internet Security needs at least 128mb in a PC to work at a reasonable speed (and anything less than a 600Mhz CPU is asking for trouble), I have installed BlackICE on a Pentium 200 with a measily 40mb ram, and it runs very well! It is a far smaller, lighter, and more reliable program than NIS, and has never EVER crashed on me.
Any negative points? All Blackice does is provide a firewall service, and an application blocking service. If you want cookie management, pop-up prevention, or virus protection, you wont find them here. For the former two, try the freeware Mozilla (www.mozilla.org), and the latter ANY Antivirus app except McAfee or Norton (unless you don't mind slowing your PC to a crawl).
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34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It does the business, 1 Sep 2003
By A Customer
Unlike an earlier reviewer I found this an easy program to install and configure and even with protection level set to paranoid it does not seem to impact performance or become intrusive in use. The difference is probably that having no need for remote access I was happy to let Black Ice close down all ports. It is clear that lovsan / blaster is still very active out there, judging by the persistent probes that Black Ice is reporting (and blocking). It has a neat installation mode that allows you to lower the defences enough to install a 'new' application (e.g. an anti virus software update) and will prompt you to re-eanble full protection when done. I bought it on a recommendation from a PC expert at work and haven't regretted it. In fact, I just bought a copy for my notebook too.
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28 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Great Program But Not For the Faint Hearted, 4 Mar 2003
Having used and worked with this program I have found it excellent at preventing hacking attacks. However it does seem to require a knowledge of the available means of entry to set up properly.You can, of course, easily close down all ports however if you want to gain remote access this is problematic. This is a program I would recommend, but time spent learning about how it works is not time wasted.
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