No, avast is a very good antivirus detecting that attacks or infected sites, but it’s not a firewall.
You can try other free ones: Outpost, Online Armour, PCTools, Comodo or ZoneAlarm.
-= Tried Outpost but it slowed down my startup… Any other recommended Firewall that is light on resource…?
Any of them will cause delays on startup. Let’s face this problem, specially the interaction with the antivirus.
You can try some other and see. I use Online Armour right now.
I picked up a sub for Online Armor on Tech’s recommendation. I am impressed. I can’t see that I would change to any other firewall. I also have Scotty on patrol (WinPatrol). As yet, there doesn’t appear to be any conflicts. XP firewall and Windows Defender are both activated.
-= I really have to buy some RAM… :-\
How much RAM do you have ?
What is your OS ?
There should be negligible interaction with the AV from a firewall unless that firewall has other security functions, when I first installed Outpost Pro (after it included anti-spyware functionality) it had huge impact on the boot time as it monitored hundreds of files (opening them) and that caused avast to scan them.
Now since the Outpost free doesn’t have any other functionality other than firewall and host protection, it will take a little time for it to get to know what applications run and create its database so it can protect you in the future.
So I would stick with it for at least a week, after all you are only booting once a day aren’t you. Whichever firewall you are choosing you need to give it a fair evaluation to get to know it. Once the boot is complete how does it perform, that is probably more important and again it takes a firewall a few days to settle in were you are likely to get more pop-ups until the firewall builds its database (also depends on your settings).
If you are short on memory any additional major application which starts on boot will have an impact, so yes additional RAM helps overall system performance.
-= Windows XP SP3… I have a gig of RAM before but about 2/3 of them got defective [probably due to static after cleaning the CPU]… So now, 256 MB left…
Well on XP, 256MB of RAM is consider the minimum, so when you add other major programs they too have a minimum usage, so those too have to share that RAM and it requires your system and hard disk to work very hard.
What is in RAM has to be constantly swapped out of RAM to the pagefile.sys file and this means your hard disk is thrashing away swapping in and out of the pagefile.sys, this in itself creates a bottle neck as accessing your hard disk is much slower than working in RAM.
So 512MB would be an improvement over all but getting back up to 1GB would be better and considering RAM is so cheap right now (UK certainly) it would really be a wise investment, which should improve overall system performance and possibly extend your hard disk life.
It (Outpost) frequently detects attacks but also simultaneously the (avast) network shield message pops up reporting "Blocked tcp ip) etc. Why isn’t outpost blocking the attacks and why is avast doing so?
I honestly don’t know, there really isn’t enough information, inbound or outbound, your firewall settings, etc. and even then it really is hard to say. However you effectively know both are working.
If you get the outpost attack pop-up it has blocked it but the network shield may also detect the address as a domain has to go to the DNS server for the IP address ans avast doesn’t have to wait for that if the domain is on its malicious sites list.
Also my computer has slightly slowed down (considering its a quad with 2 gigs of ram) any suggestions?