Firewall

[jojo1]

I have vista home premium and avast as antivirus.  Is the windows firewall enough? Must I install another firewall? If Yes which one has no conflict with avast?

[DavidR]

My personal feeling is no as it has outbound protection disabled by default. You can enable it, but have to manually set rules, this is too much for many users, there is a program that can help make this easier.

Vista Firewall Control, check out this topic for some user friendly help for the Vista Firewall, Outbound protection, http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=30234.0

Or you can choose a third party firewall. See http://www.matousec.com/projects/windows-personal-firewall-analysis/leak-tests-results.php.

There are many freeware firewalls such as, Comodo, PCTools Firewall Plus, Jetico, etc. - Zone Alarm free works fine with avast and has a reasonably friendly user interface, however, the free version is becoming bloated with trial ware and is also crippled as far as outbound protection goes In the Program Control, configuration area, the slider will only goes as far as Medium protection, if you want more you have to buy the Pro version.