Stupid question...do i have a firewall?

Ok i've just been reading a thread on here and it sudenly occurred to me that i may not have a firewall. Could someone tell me.....if i have AntiVir installed which seems to be looking after my system great, is that different from a firewall? I had the free Zone alarm on my system a while ago but it was that that was supposedly looking after my system when i ran some of the scans through here and found i had hundreds of infections and the likes.

Have since got rid of Zone Alarm and seem to be doing well with just AntiVir and all the other spyware/adware stuff recommended on here.

The technophobe in me just always thought that if you had antivirus on your system then that was a firewall.

Calv.

 

Hello, Calv.

Antivirus and Firewall are not the same thing. You should have both. You should download a copy of Zone Alarm again. Never surf the web without both!

Antivirus protects you from viruses, of course. Firewall protects you from intrusions into your computer. People can't hack into your computer if you have a firewall.

That's a brief explanation of the two.

You should get a firewall.

 

Antivirus software protects your system from virii and trojans, while a firewall controlls access to and from your computer. AntiVir is a good antivirus program, but it isn't a firewall. Virii and trojans can't spread and spyware can't do it's dirty work without Internet access, and hackers can't mess with your computer if they can't detect or access it. Get a firewall. http://majorgeeks.com/downloads34.html

 

Many thanks for that......just one more thing though.......having Zone alarm and AntiVir on my computer running at the same time won't cause any conflict as mentioned in so many posts here will it? Or was that 2 antivirus programmes you should'nt run at the same time?

Calv

 

No, it won't. Having two anti-virus or two firewalls at the same time causes problems.