if u can afford it, i saw a decent D-link router/firewall at bestbuy the other day.. for a measly ~$45. if you have extremely sensitive data carried on your PC, i would even suggest putting aside a seperate computer and hooking it up as the main computer on the router network and you accessing the net from behind that computer. The reason is well in short terms, the router acts as a dhcp server(a common standard in isp's which assign an ip to clients from a "random" pool) which gives you an "internal" ip which is NOT accessible from the outside (the net in this case) which makes it so if people want to gain access to your machine they would need to go thru the first machine (firewall, main box connected to the router) and bounce to yours which isn't as easy as it sounds these days. Anyway i don't mean to go on for a long time.. if you just want a simple free firewall and the information stored is not that important, i would suggest sygate personal firewall. (www.sygate.com) bw