Les Jones

Tech > Check for McAfee or Norton Firewall on New Dells

Melissa went through a rough couple of days setting up a new computer at her dad's business. Even after a lot of troubleshooting and multiple calls to Dell the old computers couldn't see the new computer on the network. She emailed one of her professors and he suggested it was a firewall problem.

She had already disabled Windows firewall. The next time she talked to Dell she mentioned it, and he asked her to check the McAfee firewall. She knew it had McAfee anti-viirus, but not McAfee firewall. At least some new Dells come with McAfee or Norton firewall installed and activated. Sure enough, it had McAfee firewall. As soon as she disabled it everything worked.

I hawk big ticket firewalls for a living and like the guys I work with say, every firewall breaks the network into two parts. It's good that Dell is conscious enough of network security to ship firewall software with their PCs, but firewalls can definitely cause unforeseen problems.