can firewalls protect against viruses ?

[parachutestx]

Ok right now Im just taking it as it goes.

I bought the full package from Zonealarm which has antivirus,firewall,e-mail scanner etc it was 65 dollars or so now I have it set to where my computer is in ghost mode which Ive been told is basically hiding my IP from people on the net so if something pings me it looks like nothings there.

Is this true ? and was it a good product to pick up?

And the other thing is can this program protect against viruses/Hijackings?

[Eddy]

can firewalls protect against viruses ?

A firewall is just a part of the protection you should have on your system. A virus is just one kind of malware. There is also trojans, worms, adware, spyware etc etc.

Simply said: A firewall is like a doorman at a bar. He decides who may go in and who not. A good firewall also decides who may go out and who not. So yes, a firewall can stop certain malware from entering/leaving your system and therefor is part of the protection everyone should have. But like a doorman, the firewall only can prevent entering/leaving. Nothing more.

Just curious. It is my understanding that you already had Avast up and running (correct me if I'm wrong) Avast already is antivirus/email scanner. So only thing you had to pick up was a firewall. Than why the purchase of this whole package and which antivirus are you now gonna use?

[parachutestx]

Yes I do I just set up Avast 4 last night........I had to do a fresh reload because out of all things to happen at a computer shop when they were checking my internet connection prob even with SP2 on there I got the MIRC/bot or whatever it's called and SP2 was giving me weird probs so what we did was completely reloaded it and the guy put all the patches etc for sp1 on there including something called XPPatcher.

I bought the zonealarm package because my mom had zonealarm and it's saved her butt numerous times. So I bought the full package which gives features just the firewall doesn't I also put Avast on there as a extra precaution so ess just backing myself up in case of a problem and so far Zonealarm has blocked 2800 attepts with 228 being High ranked.

[DavidR]

The free version of Zone Alarm would have done the same as would many of the other free firewalls, that combined with avast would have been fine.

It is not recommended to have two anti-virus programs activeon your system as this could cause a conflict.