Worth Installing a firewall?

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
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Location
Newcastle, England
I have a Netgear DG834G router and I belive this has a built in firewall. So I dont use one apart from this, is it worth using something like Kaspersky internet security?
 
Well afaik the router has got inbound connections covered, it's just the outbound that arn't controled, and whether you want to monitor it.
 
i have used my dg834g for around 4 years with a patched up xp machine running sophos and i have never had any problems with viruses at all. i do have the windows xp firewall on but that does next to nothing.

good old nat helps a lot, and will stop most things, but like benjo said its only your outbound connections that you need to worry about and other people using your computer that ramdomly click on things, download exe's and install spyware etc grrrrr

you carnt beat the old human stuck in front of the pc to fudge thing up :)
 
I use the previous model to yours, the one without the firewall DG814 without any additional software. Been fine. I'm still behind NAT.

As long as you don't open up dodgy exe's, browse dodgy sites you'll be ok.
 
The problem is a lot of the times you don't know you are/have been browsing a dodgy site until it's too late. NAT is a massive step forward compared to not having anything but it's not secure. Always install AV (free options exist all you have to do is look) and always install a good software firewall (again free options exist).

To put this in context the last person to bring a PC to my home LAN told me he didn't need a firewall or AV stuff as he'd never had a problem as he always connected through his Linux box. Before it got anywhere near my LAN it was scanned sure enough it had more viri, Trojan's & spy ware than the CIA much to his disgust. This was from a highly computer literate person with tech support experience.
 
Thanks for the help. I have Kaspersky anti virus 6 installed and it does a great job in virus stakes. I allways turn off windows xp firewall as it is carp, I think I'll prolly leave it at that, seems to work ok. :)
 
US Robotics 9106 /w NAT +Windows Defender +Avast = Squeeky clean PC.

Remember virus' like disabling problematic software when they get their roots in so having a hardware firewall is a pretty safe bet.

Saves one more service running on your comp too.
 
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