How many firewalls running together is too many?
By Tracey Capen

The firewall is one of the most fundamental components of PC security — and it’s the least understood by the average computer user.

The conventional wisdom is to never run more than one antivirus program at a time and never run multiple anti-spyware apps together — so why do we routinely rely on both hardware and software firewalls?

  • Win7 didn’t warn me its firewall was running

    Lounge member Roderunner, a bit annoyed that Windows 7 runs its firewall by default, wants to know how many firewalls other Lounge members run on their PCs. That simple question started a long discussion about hardware and software firewalls and whether Win7′s is the best choice. More»
The following links are this week’s most-interesting Lounge threads, including several new questions that you may be able to provide responses to:


 ☼ starred posts — particularly useful

If you’re not already a Lounge member, use the quick registration form to sign up for free. The ability to post comments and take advantage of other Lounge features is available only to registered members.

If you’re already registered, you can jump right in to today’s discussions in the Lounge.

The Lounge Life column is a digest of the best of the WS Lounge discussion board. Tracey Capen is technical editor of WindowsSecrets.com.
Office Applications
Word Processing 
 Saving as a PDF “shrinks” Word document
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Spreadsheets 
 Creating degree values from numbers
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Databases 
 Access 2010 auto insert from field above issue
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Microsoft Outlook 
 Outlook crash! How to recover outlook.pst?
Non-Outlook E-mail 
 What e-mail client are you using?
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Windows
General Windows 
 Bios password doesn’t work
  
Windows 7
 Partitioning a hard drive for 64-bit Windows 7
Problems with Windows 7 after KB978542 update
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Windows Vista 
 Upgrading Vista Home Premium to Win7 Pro
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Windows XP 
 Power options not working
Internet/Connectivity
Internet Explorer 
 Favorites/Bookmarks file location
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Third-Party Browsers 
 Short freezes in Firefox
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Application Servers 
 SharePoint current time default value
  
Networking
 Setting a fixed IP loses internet connection
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Other Technologies
Non-Microsoft OSes 
 Ubuntu Linux 10.4 LTS out now!
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Security & Backups 
 What is your opinion of Comodo products?
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Other Applications 
 Adobe Acrobat 9 problem
  
Light Relief
Scuttlebutt
 Do monkeys have 20 fingers?
  

Related posts:

  1. Evaluating Firewalls
  2. Free Firewalls
  3. Dueling Firewalls
  4. Firewalls For Old (And I Mean *Old*) Hardware
  5. Running a virtual XP machine in Windows 7
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All Windows Secrets articles posted on 2010-05-13:

Tracey Capen

About Tracey Capen

Editor in chief Tracey Capen was the executive editor of reviews at PC World magazine for 10 years, from 1995 to 2005. He was InfoWorld's managing editor of reviews from 1993 to 1995 and worked in the magazine's test center and as networking editor from 1989 to 1992. Between his stints at InfoWorld, he was senior labs editor at Corporate Computing magazine.