Firewalls

I Need More Information On Whether Or Not To Install Firewalls.
What Will It Do , Pros And Cons. Will It Allow Me To Get Online , Will It Allow Me To Download , What Will It Prevent Or Not Allow Me To Do Any Information Would Be Helpful.

 

Not sure whether this thread is for the Programming Forum or not but you definitely want a firewall...
What does a firewall do?
Its a security application that in a nut shell (and amongst other things) controls inbound and outbound traffic from your computer. You can determine what applications can connect outside of your machine. You can control what your machine should do with ping packets that arrive at your machine, and finally they are the first line of defense if a script-kiddie should target your machine for some 'fun.'
To answer some of your questions yes you can still download stuff off the net, and yes you can still surf the net...

To be clear though it is not a Silver Bullet for Security... it will not fix all your problems. A Firewall is the first step in securing a machine that you are going to connect to the net. You also need to consider spyware fighting applications, virus scanners, and OS patches - if you are using Windows then Windows Update is your friend for the last one...

As for what decent firewalls are out there... well there are some free ones available from this site I believe... Do a search for firewalls in the Software Forum - I don't think you'll be short of results or avenues to investigate...

Good luck!

 

What Firewall software is best to use? Which ones on the firewalls forum that are listed as freeware.> Please give me some more information . So I can make an educated guess of which ones would be best to use.

 

How do you get rid of a yellow triangle with an ! in it . It is on the bottom on my taskbar it blinks and says spyware danger! It looks like the same icon that says memory low .