Well, i decided to try out vista, so i partitioned off thirty gigs of my hard drive and gave it a go. The weird thing is, now vista has found all of theses other computers, and "xbox 360 extensions", and I'm not on a LAN. I'm using cable internet connected directly into my modem, into the wall. I can literally play music from other peoples computers. This doesn't seem safe. In XP, the my network places shows no other workgroup computers. I'm stumped as to where they are coming from. Bad isp?

LOL. Opened a can of... No, I don't think it's a bad ISP, but cable Internet is like that in which most users run their windows with file/print-sharing on and firewall off.

Make sure you turn on your windows firewall and install an antivirus.

Use Avast. I had AVG, and come to find out, after installing Avast last night, it found a trojan that I'd never seen with Avast. Also, another thing you can do is to get a router and put that before all of your pc's. Then you clone the Mac address of your main pc. This way the ISP and the rest of the network only sees your router thinking it's a computer. It would essentially section off your network from everyone else giving you at least a little security.

Yeah, I have Comodo Firewall Pro and Eset NOD32. I'm currently just on this one computer, and I didn't know if i should spend the money to get a router, and if it was really worth the extra protection. If anyone has any opinions I'd be glad to hear them.

The benefits of a router are quite a few. The 1st is to offload your computer resources since you can run a pc bare naked without firewall behind a properly configured router. The 2nd one is share the connection with multiple pc's including PSP, PS3, NDS, X360, PDAs, laptops, notebooks, EeeW PCs . The 3rd one is control your connection like scheduling when the router accepts traffic.

If you have only 1 pc, forget routers. Comodo is 1 of the top. NOD32 is very good.