Update: Unfortunately, after some testing, I just realized Comodo’s UI still requires the use of a mouse. Although it has slightly more options than ESET’s firewall, the mandatory use of mouse still sucks.

In the past I’ve always used the commercial NOD32 Antivirus. Since version 3 it has also included a firewall in the ESET Smart Security. I have been quite satisfied with NOD32 Antivirus since it has a solid detection rate and more importantly to me, very minimal use of system resources. This is unlike say Norton, which is notorious for eating up 50% of your system resources even when it is doing observably nothing.

Recently though, I started getting annoyed enough by ESET’s firewall’s user interface. Simply put, I’m getting really annoyed by the fact that I have to constantly click the freqently appearing pop ups. What’s worse, the pop ups must be clicked by a mouse – it doesn’t support using a keyboard with tabbing to the right button.

That’s not too bad though, after maybe a year of using it, I’ve learned of its configuration enough so that I could set up rules to prevent the pop ups from appearing so frequently, but the occassional pop ups that appear finally drove me to investigate into better solutions.

Then I found Comodo Internet Security – which comes with an Antivirus and a Firewall.

Comodo has been well known for its firewall, but the Antivirus component is the company’s new invention – this is like the reverse of ESET, which is best known for its antivirus but then expanded its market to firewall too.

I still haven’t used Comodo long enough to do a comprehensive review of the two, but there’s one thing that I can say for certain: Comodo’s user interface is so much nicer and provides much more options than ESET.

And from somewhere I’ve read, performance and low system resources usage is one of the design philosophies of the Comodo’s team. I forgot where exactly but I think I read it from the Comodo’s official forum – you can probably take a look and you’ll quickly realize how interactive the support staff are in the forum – something that blew my expectation for a free product.

So, give it a try for this free security product, it’s definitely not wosre, if not way better than, most of its paid counterparts.