Does anyone know of a good third-party firewall that works well with the beta? Is it worth it, or is the W7 firewall good enough (as I've been hearing)?

I've been trying to play around w/ the W7 firewall settings but I must be retarded or something because I can't figure out how to get it working like the way I usually have firewalls set up (block everything incoming and outgoing by default and let it pop up 'Allow ___ to connect?' until it "learns" what I want and don't want to allow).

Windows Firewall control panel, it's straight forward, all the settings are there.

Keep in mind that there are separate settings for Home/Work and Public networks.

I wanted to block all outgoing connetions by default and then only allow programs that request it as they come (Firefox, for example), but whenever I have it block all outgoing connections it blocks everything, even if I add a rule/exception for it.

I personally use Comodo, a free firewall that is suppose to be pretty good.

I use COMODO on everything except my W7 install because it doesn't work. Grr.

i usually just disable windows firewall and let the router/switch handle all that

This, it's more reliable anyway.

Rather then start a new thread I'll ask here. This may seem like a retarded question, but oh well here goes..

If you installed windows (xp/vista/7) on its own seperate harddrive, say a 30gb SATA -- with nothing else on it except windows -- would that theoreticially allow the OS to run faster/smoother and create fast boot up times?

Not especially. If the 30GB SATA drive is rather old, then even less so.

Seconded

If you turn off the Firewall on 7 there's 3-4 more underlying services you can turn off relating to traffic filtering and IPSEC if you don't want them.

I have W7's firewall and my router up <_<

This is assuming that you trust all of the machines that connect to your LAN.

Yeah, the reason for me asking this question in the first place wasn't so much because of concern re: incoming traffic but rather the desire to only allow whitelisted outbound traffic.

A software firewall is a really bad idea for that anyway, because if a virus (the #1 reason to do such firewalling) gets on your PC, the first thing they go for after AV software is the firewall.

Mm do you have any suggestions for alternatives?

My motivation for that is actually just paranoia. I pretty much don't let anything access the internet (updaters, games, blah blah) unless its necessary for it to function (multiplayer, web browsers, yada yada)

If your machine is compromised, it does not matter if your software firewall is on or off; it is already too late. This is not a good reason to forgo the use of a software firewall.

Furthermore, consumer router hardware and personal computer both run firewall software, so differentiating between the two in the matter is kind of pointless. Not to mention that a lot of routers run embedded operating systems that could also be compromised (though this is a bit more unlikely).

It should work. I'm using it in conjunction with Windows 7 64 bit at the moment.

Unless the software firewall is the faulty software that allowed your computer to be compromised.

Shutting of unneeded services gives you more protection.

Just to follow up / FYI, I ended up the Sphinx Vista Firewall Control tool (which basically is just a GUI that uses the Vista/W7 firewall and makes it easier to configure rules without having to dig through your computer to allow programs).