About the firewall, when you say "buy a hardware firewall" you mean a router that has some fw capacity built in, right? Anyways, I like running a software one because it tells me excactly who is trying to send/receive and when. Even a nerd like me isn't gonna bother with looking through the logs of a hw firewall, but a zonealarm popup box gets my attention.
Come to think of it, I don't have a router right now. Haven't even thought about it since my laptop died, didn't think about the firewall stuff in it. Gonna get a new router (and new laptop
).