firewall and antivirus protection

I have a wirless modem/router and Zone Alarm Pro and AVG free edition is ther anything better or is this enough protection from all threats

Sounds good to me.

Make sure your router has a WEP (Wireless Encryption Password) on it and a normal password on it.

Note: Do not install the Zone Alarm Spy-Blocker toolbar because it is run by Ask, a very questionable search engine.

Ask is:

• Promoting its toolbars on sites targeted to kids.
  
• Promoting its toolbars through ads that appear to be part of other companies' sites.
  
• Promoting its toolbars through other companies' spyware.
  
• Installing without any disclosure whatsoever and without any consent whatsoever.
  
• Soliciting installations via "deceptive door openers" that do not accurately describe the offer; failing to affirmatively show a license agreement; linking to a EULA via an off-screen link.
  
• Making confusing changes to users' browsers -- increasing Ask's revenues while taking users to pages they didn't intend to visit.
  

See Here for more info.

Thank you very much. I was just wondering. My internet web browsing seems really slow to me even with firefox. I changed from 1.5 dsl to 3.0 the fastest i can where im at right now and seemed no change. I have went to speakeasy and get 2.8 mbs very close to my connection just web browsing seems slow to display pages. I have tweaked windows xp home media center and internet as much as i can. I have even added 2gigs of memory to a full 3 gigs and not much of a change at all. tried tune up utilities and little change as well.

WEP is Wired Equivalent Privacy not Wireless Encryption Password.

Windows XP supports both WEP and WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) security. WPA provides superior protection and is the better choice. But if your router is a few years old, it may not be upgradeable to WPA.

WPA is theoretically crackable, but can be secure on a practical level. With a strong password of 21 characters or more, a WPA network can withstand an attack for years.

You can disable your SSID (Service Set Identifier) broadcast from your router, once a wireless device has been hooked up to it. This prevents people from finding your wireless ID. Note that there are WLAN sniffer scripts out there able to find hidden SSIDs.

You can also take it to the next level by enbaling MAC (Media Access Control) filtering which is a 12-digit number used to identify each piece of hardware on the network.

Your internet speed might be slow probably because somebody is tapping on your wireless network.

For more information, read my post on Wireless Security here:

http://www.geekpolice.net/internet-networking-f8/wireless-security-t52.htm


To speed things up a little try these Firefox tweaks:

Type about:config into the address bar and hit enter. Type pipe in the filter field, and change the following settings (double-click on them to change them):
- Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
- Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
- Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to a number like 50. This will allow it to make 30--50 requests at once.

- Also, right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

This help a little. Do you think that the zone alarm msy be a resource hog. should I try to find a better one.

I used to use Zonealarm and my startup would take about 3 minutes which was very very slow. Probably because of conflict with kaspersky. You can try Comodo:

http://personalfirewall.comodo.com/firewall.html

Zone alarm was once the best firewall of the lot until the recent buyout, now its a greedy system hog and after installing it on a fresh install it failed the grc shields up test.
The old one always passed at full stealth.
I too now use Comodo.

Well you can also give outpost a try