Comodo Free Firewall any good?

Dear marketing people of Comodo, could you please stop this nonsense? It's much too obvious, that you're doing Undercover Marketing:

People, please don't use Comodo's products, until they stop this Spam.

Yours, VB.

No, Rusty, same answer in all the other newsgroups to which you MULTIposted your same post.

I gave up on it. Firewalls with application rules will flood the user when they start using it with prompts to permit an application to make a network connection. Some reduce that by providing "smart" lists of known apps (usually by matching with a hash signature to ensure the program is what it says it is). Okay, that was expected, but Comodo eventually forgets that you allowed an app to have network access and begins asking you over and over each time you load the app. It isn't that an update to the .exe occurred. Comodo just forgets. You may find that deleting the app or network rule and then redefining it gets it working again.

You may eventually find that your Internet access goes completely belly up until you disable their firewall whereupon you can ping, telnet, web browse, e-mail, and do everything again. Obviously there is not point in wasting resources on a firewall that you always have to disable, so you'll end up uninstalling it (and doing remnant file/dir and registry cleanup) and then reinstall it which is a nuisance. Having Comodo eventually die (after 3 fresh installs on freshly reimaged hosts) after about 2 weeks eliminated me bothering with it anymore.

Some users thought their hard drives were dying because of the repeated clicking noise from them when the drive should normally be quiescent. To some, it was like a heartbeat where every 1.5 seconds they would hear their drive spin faster. Turns out their logging is over zealous. Users had to change their network rules from Block & Log to just Block to eliminate the repetitive wear on their drives, even where there was apparently nothing to log for that event.

One is that they really, r-e-a-l-l-y, REALLY want to their users to promote their "free" product (i.e., they want unpaid associates to advertise for them). Their need to advertise is so strong and pervasive that it indicates a product-in-progress where its users are unaware they are unpaid alpha testers and then the product goes eventually commercial whereupon all those loyal users then have to buy it to continue using it. They desparately seek users to "spread the word", but why bother for a free product unless their intent is to engender awareness (i.e., free advertising) along with enlarging their prospective customerbase and hope some of the suckers, er, prior customers decide to buy it when it is no longer free. They are also desparately seeking OEMers to bundle their products on pre-built boxes to further penetrate the market. The product may turn out to remain free but it smacks too much of an alpha product foisted on uninformed users to be used as unpaid alpha testers that then get abandoned when the product goes commercial. I have to wonder why a "free" product requires activation (i.e., shades of functionality incorporated for an eventually commercial product so it also gets tested by those unpaid and uninformed alpha testers).

Two, their firewall is the only remaining one of their "free" products that doesn't require using their all-in-one loader program which results in advertising their commercial products. In other words, it is adware (for their own products). You get stuck with their Launchpad bannerware for their other products. I was told but haven't bothered to verify (since I don't bother with any of their products anymore) that they were going to abandon their Launchpad. Hopefully that has become the case. If not and it is the other way around, rolling their firewall into their Launchpad loader would be an immediate cause for abandoning that product.

Three, they won't let you search their forums until you register. It is a nuisance that someone who wants to check out complaints by their users has to register before they can search. Also, negative posts have a way of disappearing prematurely from their forums. You are required to not discuss or compare against other firewalls; else, those posts will disappear. They can't take the heat of comparison, even if to request enhancements or to contrast against alternatives from other sources. Obviously they don't want their own forums to become negative advertising of their products but they should be able to take some heat and posts that report severe bugs or inappropriate behavior should be tolerated. Again, this would only taint their forums for their "free" products if there was intent to sell those products, but even other already-commercial products tolerate far worse complaints than does Comodo. Forget about searching for all posts by a particular author since their search function refuses to hunt without something in the "Search for" field (i.e., you cannot search alone by the author). It won't let you search on "the" or other words it considers insignificant, so forget looking for you own old posts. Oh, don't use your real e-mail address, or instead use a disposable one or alias to register. Someone yanked out the e-mail addresses of their forum users and started sending out p*rn mails.

Four, they only support 32-bit Windows. Version 3 of their firewall for Windows 64 Vista was supposedly planned for March or May. I just looked at it's not out yet (although maybe there is a beta version somewhere). Even if they come out in time, decide if you really want to be using the first version of a new code branch of a product (i.e., do YOU want to be the one bleeding on the bleeding edge?).

Go read their forum on their firewall. Remember that you will only see complaints there. Users don't normally go to forums to extol or laud a product but go there to get help on problems with the product. So the bias will be slanted against a product if you go by the forum posts asking for help, but it will give you an idea of the magnitude of problems or the severity of a few problems. It's free and you could trial it for awhile to see if YOU like it and if it *continue* working for you. If it doesn't work right, uninstall it.

In message , Vanguard writes

I'm glad I found this post! I've been trying Comodo and like you, got pissed off with telling it what to do again and again. I thought it was my memory playing up but no, it was Comodo. how the heck does a program forget? I surely can't be deliberate can it?

Same here again!

Don't think I noticed that.

That hadn't occured to me as I was wrapped up trying to find a firewall that myself and my wife could use on our two machines that she would be able to manage. I see what you're saying though.

Not seen Launchpad, won't bother.

Hardly going to endear them to a prospective user base.

Exactly right! Some folk will think Cor, I like this. OK. fine if they are happy. Me, I'm going back to Bit Defender Internet Security, we both like it and are used to it. I wanted to save £40 but It does slow our systems down when it applies updates. Thanks for a very succinct analysis, I wish I'd seen this _before_ I wasted so much time on Commode (might be a better name for it!)