Thanks FrameWork and cheyenne1212 for those sites,very informationative .
About 2 years ago i got involved with some really nasty web defacers and i was just talking to one of them and for no reason he bypassed my zone alarm firewall and infected me with a boot virus.Just after that i did a bit of research on zone alarm personal firewall ( http://www.zonelabs.com) and relised it was a pretty crap firewall and switched to Outpost ( http://www.agnitum.com).Then i found out about hardware firewalls and unix & linux and how they are alot more secure than windows and software firewalls then i read somewhere else on the internet that software firewalls and windows (if configured correctly) are just as secure as hardware firewalls and any other OS.Could someone clear this up for me please ?.