Something that's always been a question to me is the degree to which you need another firewall when you're working through a router. I have two computers, one to the router with a CAT5, the other wireless to the router. I have read lots of places I don't need a firewall beyond this. XP's is disabled. McAfee AV is always up to date and running. Adaware and Spybot checked regularly. Never any problems. (Famous last words. LOL) Am I secure in your collective opinions?

The answer to your question depends upon how paranoid you are about being 100% secure. With a cable/dsl modem and router, your individual PCs on the LAN are essentially invisible to the outside world unless someone who really knows what they are doing really wants to get into your system. I connect through a router and do not use an additional firewall. In 5 years I have never had any sort of problem. But you will find those who run a router and both a commercial firewall and the XP firewall. One thing you do need to consider is that a router does not stop OUTGOING connections such as those initiated by spyware, whereas a firewall will. To combat those I keep spyware off my PCs with Spybot and AdAware.

Router can act like firewalls. I have a router at home (4-port) and from the internet, that is all anyone would see. The router 'assigns' me an IP address. Secure? probably. Would a software firewall hurt? probably not. Check to see what your IP is. If it is an INTERNET IP, then I would get a firewall, if it's an 'internal IP', I think you're cool. Internal IPs = 10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255 172.16.0.0 - 172.31.255.255 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255

That's a loaded question but throwing my two cents into the hat, I would say to err on the positive side. Just assume a friend comes over and says I have this program I'd like you to take a look at. He pops it in the drive, starts it up and it really looks like a neat program. Well, let's assume there's a worm or something buried in that program. You probably wouldn't notice any outgoing stuff with just the router. This is where a software firewall might come in handy. The XP firewall only works on incoming also. Maybe I'm all wet but with the way things are these days I don't think I would entirely trust just the router. Ron

Thank you all very much. This is exactly the kind of thing I wanted to know. :)

Here is my two cents worth. As stated you can (and should) err on the side of safety. What I mean is run the software firewall on each of your machines. You stated that one of your machines connects via a wireless network. What happens if someone intercepts your wireless network. This is behine the router and this person now has total access to your computer if you are not running a software firewall. In short RUN A SOFTWARE FIREWALL ON EACH MACHINE. It is just another line of defence in case your primary line of defence is ever breached.

Well, a router by nature has NAT capabilities (network addressing table). This literally means that your computer is on one side of the router and the connection is on the other, with a "wall" of filters in between. By default on ANY router, those filters block everything incoming, from outside. Most routers do allow you to configure outgoing filters and incoming as well. There are some things that you might want to change in your router's settings though. The most important one is disabling remote router configuration access, this is on by default in most routers. The router cfg is pwd protected, usually by 128 or 168bit RAS encryption, but still, web access from anywhere to your router? A software firewall, it's really up to you, I'm the paranoid type so I run ZoneAlarm. the XP firewall basically sucks, so don't use it. Zonealarm is free, and allows you to configure ingoing and outgoing access for individual programs, as well as setting up a blanket firewall.