>>ZoneAlarm regularly causes BSODs on my win98SE
Really? Not on mine. Must be a hardware thing then.
>> but how would this stop apps 'calling home'?
That's exactly why I suggest to use both, a hardware firewall (may be part of a simple router anyway) to block the thoudsands of door-knocking script kids hacking attempts every day, and something like Zonelalarm that tells you if there's an App trying to phone home.
well, there's one thing that is cool about win98: when you disable NetBios eg. by renaming VNBT.386 to say VNBTsucks.386 (in dos mode) or something, and when you don't surf the internet, you may run NETSTAT /a and you'll get zero ports listening! That's a real stealth mode. Compare that to Windows XP that forces you to allow several "generic" services to access the web, just to make sure your web browser will be able to use the internet at all.
Really? Not on mine. Must be a hardware thing then.
>> but how would this stop apps 'calling home'?
That's exactly why I suggest to use both, a hardware firewall (may be part of a simple router anyway) to block the thoudsands of door-knocking script kids hacking attempts every day, and something like Zonelalarm that tells you if there's an App trying to phone home.
well, there's one thing that is cool about win98: when you disable NetBios eg. by renaming VNBT.386 to say VNBTsucks.386 (in dos mode) or something, and when you don't surf the internet, you may run NETSTAT /a and you'll get zero ports listening! That's a real stealth mode. Compare that to Windows XP that forces you to allow several "generic" services to access the web, just to make sure your web browser will be able to use the internet at all.