My firewall choices and some help?

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ninethreeeleven

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Jul 16, 2004
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I have 3 choices right now in terms of firewall protection.
1) Windows firewall
2) nVidia firewall
3) D-Link router Firewall

What would be the best one, right now I use the nVidia but I cannot for the life of me figure out what its doing to bittorrent (leagal music). Or maybe its my router (D-Link Gaming Lounge DGL-4300) blocking ports or what not.

I was happy with the nVidia one until I find its blocking half of my bittorrent stuff, even after telling it to stop and changing the ports in to be used (so I know its not my ISP) so now given my choices what should I use?
 
Use the d-link, and use the windows one at the same time... double protection.

QJ
 
A few more questions, will Windows see the router firewall? Or will it bitch at me for being unprotected?

Also since this is a router will the other computers (2) be protected? Or will they have to run firewalls as well?
 
Yes Windows will complain that you don't have a firewall if you just use a SOHO router as a firewall. Yes all PCs on your network will recieve a level of protection from a hardware firewall.

There are differences to all of the firewalls you have posted.

The hardware firewall prevents connections from outside your network from reaching your PC if you haven't already opened a port on the firewall or if you didn't start the connection from inside. So while hardware firewalls are nice, they do nothing to help if you have a trojan or virus or anything else (spyware, etc...) on your PC.

The Windows firewall is a nice feature but doesn't do as much as some of the stand alone software firewalls do. You can find a nice write up from Microsoft on what it does.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/security/internet/sp2_wfintro.mspx

I personally don't have any experience with the nVidia product but some things you'll want to consider, when in the boot process does it load? How long is your network connection up before the firewall is running? Is support for the software ongoing (recieveing updates and the like)?

Personally I would agree with QJ on running both a hardware and a software (Windows built in works well enough for most people) is the way to go since they protect you from different things.
 
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