Sayonara

Sounds like you do have safe habits, but without a firewall what happens at your ports is completely beyond your control. And without active defensive measures, you'll never detect any unwanted traffic (not to mention the fact that you'd barely notice the extra performance gained by turning off a firewall, unless it's a really badly made one that chews up processor cycles). You could be used as a spam relay and never know it - that's wasted resources.

Only in the same sense that it runs better with any 1 program turned off. It's a payoff between performance and security.

3. We realllly like computers.

If you just have 1 PC, there's no point trying to make a LAN. We have 6 PCs in this household you see. Plus one autonomous Freevo. So sharing the same DSL connection and sharing files etc means making a LAN, and the most effective way to do that for us is through a gateway.

I think we might be getting to the bottom of your blessed existence.

All requests to the net have to pass through the gateway, which allows the gateway to check for blacklisted DNS entries and refuse known malservices. Likewise all incoming traffic is routed through the hub, so nothing bad can get on to the network. Also, like aom said, it frees up resources on the LAN terminals.

The most common routes of infection are worms transmitting themselves via open ports (hence the need for a firewall to close those ports off), or infected mail. There are viruses now that don't even need to be previewed to be able to launch themselves from clients like Outlook Express (which, incidentally, is the biggest piece of vulnerable crap in the universe).

Then what is "too late"?

A PC acting as a central Unix hub for a LAN, running hardware and software firewalls.

Nobody has actually said "hey I get X viruses", so I don't know what you're talking about. I don't get viruses. That's not because I don't know they're there, it's because I know how to recognise and avoid them, and if they do get on they last less than a millisecond because I am well-defended.

Too late for what? To update your A/V? If it's not up-to-date, it will just miss a lot of problems. Last week Sophos issued about 40 new virus warnings - if you haven't updated since January you can imagine the unseen horrors.

Yes, but I'm behind a physical gateway at the minute so I don't need a FW.

McAfee I think.

Yes the O/S matters, because some (like XP) are constantly found to have gaping great security holes. Make sure your A/V is fully updatd before you run it.

If you have a direct modem connection, no firewall, and no a/v, I guarantee your PC is being port scanned constantly by worms, and I wouldn't be surprised if you've picked a good few up. What OS do you use?

Doesn't AOL bb come with a firewall and A/V?

Jesus Christ.

Is your PC plugged directly into a modem, or are you on a network?

The intervening posts would suggest that I did, yes.

Now you just sound stupid, sorry.

I would put money on your PC having at least 1 uninvited guest if you use no defences of any sort. Describe your set-up. I'm betting you're behind a physical gateway?

See Blike's points above.

I'd say it's not ethical to torture someone, but as faf indicates there are occasions where it will be morally justifiable.

Repeating the same things over and over deosn't make them more believable. "...but if you put it together" We call this a house of cards.