ZoneAlarm Free Firewall: Local Network Control Without Complexity General Overview ZoneAlarm Free Firewall has been around for years — long enough to be called a classic. It’s not flashy, and it doesn’t try to be an all-in-one security suite. What it offers instead is straightforward: a system-level firewall for Windows, with a GUI simple enough for non-admins but configurable enough for those who want to know what’s talking to what.

It works by intercepting outbound and inbound traffic and pro

ClamWin: Lightweight, Open-Source Antivirus for Windows Power Users General Overview ClamWin is a bare-bones antivirus scanner for Windows, built around the open-source ClamAV engine. There’s no real-time protection, no fancy dashboards, no background monitoring. It does one thing: scans files or directories for known threats using an up-to-date signature database.

This tool is mostly used by advanced users who either want a secondary scanner to run on-demand or need something minimal for low-r

Sophos Home: When You Need Something Stronger Than Consumer Antivirus General Overview Sophos Home isn’t built for tinkerers. It’s meant for people who want a serious security engine on their personal machines — something closer to what big companies run on their endpoints, but without the mess of policy servers and group configs.

It uses the same backend engine as Sophos’ enterprise tools. You install a small agent on the machine, register it, and from that point, all settings are managed onli

Bitdefender Free: Set-It-and-Forget-It Antivirus, If That’s What You Want General Overview Bitdefender Free is one of those tools you install, let run in the background, and barely think about again — and that’s the point. It’s designed for users who don’t want to fiddle with settings, but still need dependable antivirus protection that gets daily updates and doesn’t nag them with popups.

Under the hood, it uses the same detection engine as the commercial Bitdefender products — same virus signa