Originally Posted by
ScottC
So, focus more in the central side (your email etc...) and consider either setting up a simple VPN at home or asking if your ISP supports secure pop connections. A firewall looks nice and reports a load of attempts, but unless you have something open on your machine then the WinXP firewall will be more than sufficient.
ScottC hit the nail on the head, go with a VPN connection and use secure email and web when you can.
For software firewalls I am smitten with Blink
http://www.eeye.com/html/consumer/pr...ink/index.html
Blink, from Eeye, is free for personal use. I am convinced its the most effective firewall/malware/spyware/adware toolkit available and its very lightweight. It takes up a fraction of the memory/cpu footprint that just one of those applications alone normally takes... in short, I'm zealous about it to the point of not building an XP box without it.