Gday, Basically, i would like to know if i should disable my fireweall when playing games. I am saying this in the interest of a lower latency. My computer is using WinXP SP2 with the updates all installed. When I play the game, I will disable all applications and processes that I dont want running. Furthermore, I will disable my firewall, what are the risks of inefection with my firewall disabled and what improvemnts can i expect to see from latecny and downloading speeds? Thanks for any help

Dont do it. Better safe than sorry, games can be used to distribute trojans now. Avarik ~

how often does that happen, i want better latency, just how much should i expect. I became even more interested when I read that zone alarm was quite slow. these are big-name games with proper servers like game arena, so they should be safe... right?

Not necessarily. I play Battlefield Vietnam with ZoneAlarm active or not. Got same-same as you 2.4 GHZ, 512MB system. Don't see much difference. You did not mention how you are accessing the game servers. DSL, cable, satellite? You can always go to dslreports.com (doesn't matter whether you have DSL or not) and run their Tweak Test to see if they recommend anything to tweak your system and get better performance. If you have satellite connection, forget it, higher latency is an issue with satellite.

oh yea, 256/64 adsl, im about to test ping with dslreports with firewall on and off, will report results

using tcpIQ: WITH Firewall: Download speed: 196.23 KBits/sec or 24.53 KBytes/sec Upload speed: 50.60 KBits/sec or 6.32 KBytes/sec DNS Speed: 484.00 mSec Latency: 87.00 mSec WITHOUT Firewall: Download speed: 196.37 KBits/sec or 24.55 KBytes/sec Upload speed: 50.56 KBits/sec 6.32 KBytes/sec DNS Speed: 484.00 mSec Latency: 80.00 mSec Im kind of wary of this test, the result changed when the system hadn't changed, the ping was different by 10, but theres obvious reason for that over the internet, ill just try it on a game tonight and test it then

the win xp sp2 firewall is very weak. It doesnt affect your network latency. The only thing it does is block some incoming connections. If you had a trojan on your system that was sending packets out of your network, the xp firewall wouldnt do a thing about it. If however, you tried to fileshare hack into the computer remotely running the windows xp firewall, it would block it. XP Firewall - better then nothing...barely. Zone Alarm - for noobs or first time firewallers. Personally I like Netscreen.