Most modern broadband routers ship with a hardware-based firewall and, as anyone in security will agree, a hardware firewall is always more secure than a software-only firewall. For this reason, many users now forget to install or turn on their Windows firewall, thinking that their hardware firewall is keeping their system safe.

However, this isn’t always the case. Some hardware-based firewalls are not configured out-of-the-box, so you are either protected against every possible attack, not at all, or somewhere in the middle (ie. some ports are enabled, some are disabled). If you’re running your own home network, each computer will need to be configured individually. This can be achieved from your hardware-based firewall. You can configure your firewall to allow or disallow traffic, depending on your computer. This isn’t always that easy to understand. It’s more simple configuring each PC using the firewall installed on the computer.

Webroot Desktop Firewall 5.5 was previously a commercial-grade software firewall that is now available for free. It’s superb for installing on your home computer, but it only ships with a free license for 1 PC and for personal-use only.

Note that you to register through Webroot in order to obtain your serial code to use Desktop Firewall. If you already own Webroot Spy Sweeper, and have that installed on your machine, Desktop Firewall will not need a separate serial code.