best firewall combo

[lght1]

Hi

I am on dsl, and have been using a dlink 704 for several years now with no issues at all.

However, now, I am also using a NF3 250 Ultra board with onboard lan with its own built in firewall. And , of course, I am using WinXP SP2, with its own little firewall.,

I also do some gaming.

What is the best combo for me, or should i just disable Xp's and NF3's built ins in favor of just the router?

thanks

[greEd]

Three firewalls is overkill for the typical home user. Since you are behind a router I would say that alone is enough to keep you protected.

I would disable the builtin firewall on the motherboards builtin LAN port.
For max protection: I'm not familiar with that specific DLink but if you can block both inbound/outbound then I would set strict rules outbound allowing access to ports you need to connect only. If the DLink doesn't have outbound firewalling then I would enable the builtin firewall in XPSP2.

regards,
greEd

[YeOldeStonecat]

Agree..you don't need to run the mobo's built in firewall....that's just another NAT device. Running 2x NAT devices gives you no additional protection over a single NAT device, assuming all settings are default. A closed one way door is a closed one way door. You will probably also run into some glitches with software that might not like going through double NAT situations.