I like firewalls to have outbound protection. This is because when I got hit by a virus, ZoneAlarm stopped it from sending itself on to all my contacts. So, the firewall in Windows XP has never impressed me and I was excited to hear that the Vista firewall would include outbound protection.

But does it? This question came to head when I actually had to write about the firewall and it suddenly became very difficult to get an answer to the question. Looking through the settings suggested not but the information from Microsoft suggested yes. I don't like going to editors saying 'the balance of probability suggests x. Mainly because they don't like it either.

Computerworld have found that, yes there is some outbound protection but you have to use the Advanced Security Group Policy applet in the Microsoft Management Console. Although one of the comments suggests there is an easier way it still sounds harder than ZoneAlarm

This is my greatest frustration with Vista in a nutshell; it's so difficult to do anything beyond the basics of settings.

It's a fair point that many ordinary users probably don't really think about the firewall warnings but at least the warnings are there.

I'm going to stick with recommending a third party firewall for the time being