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Vista Firewall Control is a powerful software utility which gives you the possibility to manage the access of applications attempting to establish an Internet connection. The goal is to prevent suspicious tools from making room for malware infiltrations, so the program can be used as the first line of defense against e-threats (the second being an antivirus solution).

Although its interface is classical, users shouldn't think that it's very easy to work with Vista Firewall Control. It automatically cuts of all network access when launched, so you have to start administering Internet-based programs right away.

It creates an icon in the system tray area at startup and pops up a notification for each application trying to connect to the web, and users have the possibility of disabling this alert for any tool. They can view program details and apply a setting by enabling or disabling all apps, incoming only or outgoing connections.

An important feature of Vista Firewall Control is represented by its ability to apply a user-defined set of permissions to zones. Programs whose access rules were previously set can be monitored in a list, where it is possible to add new entries or exclude existing ones.

Users can disable the Windows taskbar integration, enable and analyzing log details with Vista Firewall Control's activity, deactivate sounds on important events, change existing rules, as well as investigate statistics.

The app does not put a strain on computer performance, since it runs on low CPU and RAM. It had a good response time to commands and did not hang, crash or pop up error messages in our evaluation.

Vista Firewall Control is a pretty efficient security program, although it mainly caters to users with some minimal background in firewall tools. On the other hand, many important features are not available in the free edition.