Is Windows XP Pro firewall good enough???

[james8t2]

with all these viruses that are being spread thoughout the internet, i was just wondering. if i have my firewall enabled on windows xp, will it block all these worms and viruses? or do i need to get a antivirus like norton? the reason i ask is because im kinda broke right now and the windows firewall is all i can really do right now.

 

[Budman]

You need both A firewall & an antivirus program.

The Xp's built in firewall should be ok.

 

[XBoxLPU]

Why not use ZoneAlarm's free firewall ?

Free AVG Anti-virus

 

[james8t2]

well if xp's firewall is good enough, i want to stick with it because i wanna keep things on my system as simple as possible, but if the xp's firewall isnt good enough, i guess i might have to upgrade later

 

[dkozloski]

I was doing a fresh reinstall of WinXP on my laptop the other evening and had the XP firwall enabled as I was already connected to the net to download drivers and such. Before I could get Zone Alarm Pro installed, up popped the shutting down message that indicated that the worm had already installed itself. I had to reboot and delete MSBlast.exe in task manager before I could go to Windows Update for the patch. A trip over to Symantic to run FixBlast and an installation of NortonAV cleaned up the remains. This experience would indicate to me that the XP firewall is not effective.

 

[Arcanedeath]

XP's firewall isn't really that good because it doesn't stop anything for calling out, just some stuff from getting in, your better off using the free zonealarm as it's a true software firewall, has program lvl acess, and will keep stuff from getting out unless you let it