Firewall advice

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

I am using Avast free, which has served me well for years. For a Firewall I used to use Comodo free firewall and thought it was great, that was until it started to become very buggy and crash on both of my laptops running, Windows 7. So, I removed Comodo and went over to ZoneAlarm free Firewall. I noticed that one of my laptops has begun to run slowly at times, but I put this down to it’s age. But! I have since installed ZoneAlarm free Firewall on the other one, and have noticed a lag also, so I’m thinking it’s a resource hog.

I am thinking of just uninstalling ZoneAlarm, and go back to using good old Windows Firewall, but since I am using Windows 7, which no longer gets security updates, is this a bad idea?

2

Well your timing couldn’t be better as Avast Free is about to get a firewall.

See https://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=299095.0 - which sees some actually get the avast free firewall. Whilst this isn’t going out to everyone immediately.

See this extract on that.

3

Sounds good, but is it still safe to use Windows 7 Firewall in the meantime? I know Windows 7 no longer receives security updates, but the fundamentals of it’s Firewall should remain the same, right?

4

I can’t say as I no longer use win7, but I’m still using the win10 firewall, I don’t know if there are any differences in that.

A google search perhaps, comparison windows 7 Vs windows 10 firewall.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=comparison+windows+7+Vs+windows+10+firewall

There are a lit of hits, but many are old which is understandable.