hi im going to buy a firewall.
which one would you reccomend?

Free firewalls:
Zone Alarm
older versions here.

Kerio Personal Firewall [available in a full and limited free edition].

Kerio Personal Firewall 2.1.5 [last freeware version that was strictly a firewall and not bundled with extra features that hog resources and slow down your system performance].
Alternate download site

Note: Kerio Technologies had announced Kerio PF would be discontinued as of December 31, 2005 and no longer available for purchase or subscription renewal after that date. Read here. But on December 1, 2005 Sunbelt Software and Kerio Technologies, Inc. announced that the parties had signed an agreement for Sunbelt to acquire the Kerio Personal Firewall and re-branded it on an interim basis as the "Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall". All existing customers of the Kerio Personal Firewall will be able to receive support through Sunbelt once the acquisition is completed. Sunbelt will continue Kerio's tradition of providing a basic free version for home users. Read here and here.
Effective November 30th, 2005 all Sygate personal firewall products and forum support will be discontinued. See here

What about a hardware firewall or proxy? Which would you recommend in that case? I'm not a big fan of personal desktop firewalls.

Firewall FAQs
http://www.firewallguide.com/faq.htm

Comparing Firewall Features
http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Com...l_Features.html

A hardware firewall is really a software firewall running on a dedicated piece of hardware or specialized device. It can provide a strong degree of protection from most forms of attacks coming from the outside. Hardware firewalls are easy to configure and they can protect every machine on a local network. A hardware firewall typically uses packet filtering to examine the header of a packet to determine its source and destination addresses. This information is compared to a set of predefined or user-created rules that determine whether the packet is allowed (forwarded) or denied (dropped) on particular ports. They tend to treat any kind of traffic traveling from the local network out to the Internet as safe which can be a security risk.

With a software firewall you can specify which applications are allowed to communicate over the Internet from your computer. Programs that are not explicitly allowed to do so are either blocked or else the user is prompted for confirmation before the traffic is allowed to pass. Software firewalls generally offer the best measure of protection against Trojans and worms but they are harder to configure. Another drawback is that they must share resources with other running processes on your computer and this can decrease performance.

Proxy Firewalls stand between a trusted and un-trusted network, inspects the entire packet and makes the connection on behalf of the source. The request does not automatically go to the destination computer. Instead, the proxy firewall impersonates the internal destination computer and accepts the request on behave of the computer it is protecting. If the proxy decides the packet is safe, it sends it onto the destination computer. When the destination computer replies, the reply goes back to the proxy server, which repackages the packet to contain the source address of the proxy server, not the host system on the internal network. The proxy hides the true network address and there is no direct connection to internal computers.

Proxy - confuses me.
I found someplace on my computer that the proxy IP address is 127 ... I think it was the same as loopback.
Then somewhere else I saw there's no proxy.
Having just explained so neatly those few features, can you give just a bit more detail, PLEASE?

i dont want free fire walls i wanna buy a good one. whicj ones are the best?

Personal Firewall Reviews
http://www.firewallguide.com/software.htm
http://www.pcmag.com/category2/0,1738,4722,00.asp

thanks

Here is a list of alternate freeware programs...


Firewalls(Run only one.)
Zone Alarm Free for Personal Use
SyGate Personal Free Edition
OutPost Firewall Free
Jetico Personal Free
Kerio Free Personal Firewall (Reported not to be offered after 12-31-2005)