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Originally Posted by bigal2
whats THE best way to keep your stuff safe?
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If all your PCs are behind the router, then the router behaves as a firewall, and prevents all unsolicited traffic from getting to the PCs. So firewalls on the individual PCs are of limited benefit, and indeed they might even interfere with PC-to-PC traffic on the LAN. The only point to having a firewall on each PC is that some firewalls can detect unexpected
outgoing traffic, that might alert you to the presence of spyware or trojans.
But a well-managed PC should not have spyware or trojans on it anyway, so your time would be better spent preventing such things becoming installed in the first place. So you should have a good anti-vrius system running at all times, and from time to time you should run AdAware or SpyBot Search and Destroy to eliminate downloaded malware.
A good strategy for keeping a PC clean is
not to use Outlook or Outlook Express as an e-mail client. The majority of e-mail borne viruses and worms exploit weaknesses in those mailers to infect other users' systems. I regularly receive e-mail viruses which would have infected my PC if I had so much as previewed them in Outlook Express: but because I use a different mailer, I can view them without worries.