My search for the best software personal firewall is over (I hope). After spending what must of been well over a year on Zone Alarm I finally had enough of it's resource hogging ways and turfed it. Don't get me wrong Zone Alarm certainly does the job, what annoyed the hell out of me was the CPU smashing at boot time when loading up the desktop and the way over use of my RAM.

The hunt for a software firewall of my liking has been an ongoing affair since changing my ADSL router which resulted in it not being able to talk correctly with my hardware based firewall mOnO wall.

With the uninstall of Zone Alarm of I went to the downloads section of CNet (a must if your looking for software). Where I stumbled across Comodo in somebody's review post, a quick google told me all I needed to know.

This is by far the best free firewall on the net, very easy to setup and customise to my liking, very low on resources at the time of writing it's only using 12MB of RAM and most importantly it's strong. On a number of leak tests that are designed to by-pass a firewall the Comodo firewall performed amazingly well straight out of the box. Read here to review the leak tests.

In short, if you're not using this firewall to protect your home machine your leaving yourself wide open...get it now.

All though new in my eyes, Raxco have been putting out a disk defragmentation app for some time but this is the first version I've used and I tell you what it's fantastic. Being an avid user of Diskeeper Pro for some time I thought I was on a winner untill Raxco PD rocked up. I was amazed at how much more through and more brutal it was in defragging my hard drives. Raxco use a paten SMARTPlacement process over a single pass to ensure your drives are defragged to the best they can be. Click here to see a comparison between Diskeeper and Raxco PD 7....it might surprise you.

A good friend of mine found this web base app, Spiceworks is the ideal tool for monitoring your network. I've tried this at home and found it very easy to use (remember your firewall's!), although not using it to it's full potentional, I did find that it threw some really use full info at me. So if you're in an enterprise environment with plenty of workstations and servers this is for you.
Download it here.