Security suggestions needed (firewall hard+soft)

[Frosteh]

I've recently started getting a lot more secutiry minded with my PC, i've used in the past Norton and Mcafee anti virus and firewalls, I've found that Mcafee firewall was nice but it uses a lot of processes and system resources which i dont like even though my PC is barely effected by this.

Currently Im using a linksys router which is a 4 port switch with an ADSL2+ connection, it comes with a firewall option which is on but it's not really configurable, it only comes with firewall on/off and toggle options for Filter Proxy / Filter Cookies / Filter Java Applets / Filter ActiveX and a toggle for denying ping requests

So it's pretty basic It seems to block most things by default and I have the option of opening certain ports or range of ports which I've done to make sure my torrent applications connect properly, it also adds records to that list for certain programs (which must be requesting connections and the router is auto allowing, like MSN etc)

So some questions:

Is a hardware firewall with this little configuration enough?
Is there anywhere I can safely test my hardware firewall?
Can anyone recommend a decent lite software firewall which only runs a few processes?

Thanks for any help!

 

[Frosteh]

I've just tried hackerwatch.org, a basic port scan of common ports has revealed them all stealthed which I assume is good.

This probably means that my hardware firewall keeps every port closed until something on the LAN requests a connection out to the net.

So maybe it's not necessary for a software firewall?

 

[da sponge]

A software firewall isn't likely to protect you from external threats if you're behind NAT. However, if you want to have some outbound control they can be useful (or if you're ever in a location not behind your NAT, say a laptop on public wifi). Software firewalls can be bypassed by sophisticated malware/viruses though.