Originally posted by: Klingon_Jedi

Speaking of firewalls, what's a good, free third-party firewall? I ask because I'm currently using a now unregestered Norton Security '03(came pre-installed) and I'm sending my machine back to the company for repairs, so I may lose it.(it's a great ad-blocker, which is why I kept it.) Also, how does one disable the "you are running out of disc space" balloon? I download often, so I keep seeing that. It bugs the hell out of me.

Try Kerio, it's supposed to be good and I think they have a free version, too. ZoneAlarm is OK but it has compatibility problems with *lots* of stuff, I hear.

I don't know how to disable those disk space balloons, other than you can get a Samsung 160GB 7,200 rpm hard drive with a 8MB cache for about $80-$90 or so...

... there's even cheaper 160 GB drives around there but Samsungs are really quiet and they give ok performance with good rpm and cache size.

EDIT:

Ooooooh, yet one more version of the OT ? Sounds great, but with my current torrent cutoff problems, I'd like to get an expert's opinion on that before getting it ... hopefully some "unbiased" person will give us some first-hand experience insight on the quality and such ?