Improvements in the Windows 7 Firewall

As with Vista, Microsoft has made improvements on the built-in firewall. While it's still not on a league with the best of breed 3rd party firewalls, it does a pretty good job. I've found that for the vast majority of folks, 3rd party firewalls are complicated to set up and the messages they generate are almost indecipherable to the average person. What I see is folks just approving every prompt that comes up which kinda defeats the purpose. For the average person I set up, I usually let the built-in firewall do it's job. I will recommend using the W7 firewall unless circumstances dictate otherwise.

Here's an article on WindowsSecurity.com by Deb Shinder that does a nice job of detailing the new features of the W7 firewall.

http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Whats-new-Windows-7-Firewall.html