Although I don't use it any longer I have been a long time user of Norton PF and before that Conseal by Signal9 (I believe Symantec bought their firewall engine technology from Signal9).
Norton PF IMHO is a good product, it's not cumbersome bloatware like System Works, it's a Firewall and that's that. It's a good all round product for the novice and expert user alike, it has a slider control to set the complexity level of it's control and interaction which suits most people I know. I believe that Zonealarm is a lot more simplistic in this respect but I could be wrong.
I've not used it in over a year so maybe it's improved but it had a Live Update facility to automatically get updated rulesets and the such like, these could be a bonus to a novice user but I don't know if that's you
.
For me, the thing I liked most about PF was the ability to set very specific rules about what internet traffic was to be allowed or blocked. It could be a labour of love sometimes but I took a great deal of pride in being very careful setting rules and not to simply hit the 'Allow this' button when PF asked.
PF has a neat but potentially dangerous feature to block the transmission of personal information; You could optionally tell PF your home address, full name, bank details and so on. If it saw that information being transmitted from your PC to the internet it would popup a warning giving you the choice of what to do. I think it has other features like ad blocking and so on which could be handy too.
Although nothing is completely secure I don't trust Windows personal firewalls enough to reply upon them. IIRC, the Wm.Bugbear virus (and possibly others too) could recognise some personal firewalls and disable them.
Me? I use an
appliance based firewall product called
SmoothWall. In a nutshell, it transforms a defunct old PC and 2 network cards that you might have lying around into an external Linux based firewall applicance. Once it's initially setup you just need the system unit (no mouse/kbd/monitor required) and best of all the GPL version is free