walls of fire and their speed reduction

[quns]

I noticed a synificant change in speed with my firewall turned on, granted I have three firewalls (windows, my motherboards built in nvidia fire wall, linksys firewall)  and, often only use the linksys wrt54g built in router the majority of the time.

My question is ; do i realy need to use all three? Are there any firewalls out there that just watch for attacks and then alerting you , so i could just have them turned off untill needed and Which firewalls do you recommend?

thanks

[fattymcbluff]

windoes just blocks out going and all yuo need is one

(i think )

[raptors892004]

There are free firewalls such as Zone Alarm Personal and Kerio Personal that watch out for attacks and then block them.. You have to set up rules for them (for what programs can have access to the internet), but after that setup its pretty much run in the background and sometimes edit the rules so new programs can access the Internet.. I do not bielieve you need all 3 firewalls (I only have 1software + 1 hardware in my router )

[FallowEarth]

I would suggest running a firewall for every second that you are online, as opposed to turning it off and on.  raptors892004 suggested some very good *free* firewalls that I would use in place of the XP firewall.  It does not hurt to run a software firewall (ZoneAlarm) and a hardware firewall (Linksys) at the same time, as they each perform different tasks.  As for the slow down, were you able to determine which firewall was the culprit?