I have a Lynksys router on my system, and Gnet and Dlink routers on many customer's nets, with the firewalls enabled. They do a good job and are not constantly getting "in your face" when you are attempting to do something on the net. If all the crap is caught on the inbound side, there is nothing on your machine to attempt to contact the net except what you want to contact the net.
I HATE Norton with a vengeance - ever synce Symantec took over from Peter. Their support sucks big time, and the products are so complex and intrusive. McAfee is a bit better. I rember the days when, if you had a problem with a Norton product (norton utilities, antivirus, or whatever) you could actually talk to "the man" himself. Peter was always very helpful back then, when only those who really NEEDED computers had them and any problem was considered serious.
Currently I use Avast and AVG antivirus, and AdAware SE on a regular basis, and Clean My PC from Registry-Cleaner.net every month or so. I have not had an infestation on my XP system in over a year - and the system has been running without scrubbing or reformatting the system for about 3 years.
Reformatting and reloading is a last resort "using an atom bomb to swat a fly" solution.
Sorry, Harry, but you don't have a clue what you're talking about. The Linksys broadband/DSL router (model BEFSX41) uses NAT (Network Address Translation), and has an effective firewall. The
*only* address seen by the outside world is the internet address that your ISP assigns to the router upon establishing a lease (usually dynamically by DCHP). Your internal network addresses are completely invisible to the outside world.
As far as your ISP and the internet are concerned, there is only one computer connected to the internet, the router. All requests to or from computers on your internal network have their addresses translated by NAT to that address before going out into the internet jungle. As far as the internet is concerned, those requests are originating in the router. The firewall in the router controls all access between your internal network and the internet.
Since the router is not a Windows based machine, hackers attempting to attack you with the normal Windows hacking tools, or are running port mappers, or are using tricks to overflow Windows buffers to gain control of the computers on your internal network, will have no luck. To the script kiddies, those computers just aren't there, and the computer they think is there, isn't a Windows machine.
If they have reason to suspect a router/firewall between them and their target, there are ways to attack the router if you weren't security conscious when you set it up. But if you configure it properly, all they can do is throw a denial of service attack at it. There's really no defense you can mount against that at home. Your ISP has to have mechanisms (quotas, software fuses, etc) in place to deal with that sort of attack.
Of course no router or firewall can protect you against a virus or worm which comes as an email attachment that you must click on to activate. No router or firewall can protect you against deliberately downloading an infected program from a web site and running it. Those sorts of attacks require your active, if unwitting, cooperation.
Don't be stupid. Never open an unknown attachment, or use an email program which automatically does that for you, such as Outlook Express. Never run a program you've downloaded which hasn't been vetted by a frequently updated virus checker. Better still, don't install any program to which you don't have hard media from the manufacturer of the program.
Decline all offers by websites to install "helper" applications when browsing the net. Disable Javascript, Direct-X, etc in your browser (or use a browser which doesn't have them in the first place). If your browser doesn't have built in pop up stopper capability (Firefox does), get and install Popup Stopper.
***Install the registries of the machines on your internal network on a network drive to which the machines lacking administrator permission have only read-only access.***
Oh, yeah, *never* log into any of your machines with administrator permission unless you are installing new software, and *never* while there is a connection to the internet. Create a normal log in that does *not* have administrator permission for all your activities except software installation.
This is all just basic computer and network security practice.
This is not true. That model Linksys has both NAT and a powerful stateful firewall (the only kind that's effective when using NAT).
**IF** you configure it correctly, it is *extremely* effective.
Firewalls don't do anything to inhibit cookies or viruses. Firewalls are strictly network access control tools. They're very powerful tools to prevent the script kiddies from attacking your Windows machines, but they aren't directly involved in dealing with cookies or viruses. Cookies are inhibited by your browser settings, and viruses are caught (hopefully) by anti-virus programs.
(You bought your software firewall and your virus checker from the same vendor, Norton, but they are two entirely separate things doing two entirely separate jobs.)
If you don't update your anti-virus reference files at least daily, you're very vulnerable to the never ending stream of new viruses intended to attack Windows systems. Even if you do update daily, there's still a window of vulnerability from the time a new virus is released onto the internet and the time your anti-virus vendor discovers it and releases an updated reference file to catch it. So you still need to practice safe computing practices even if you do have a good anti-virus program which is being updated daily.
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