Hmm, good firewalls. So many choices so little space to discuss them all. For free windows firewalls I think you can narrow it down to my personal favorite 4.

Zone alarm- Zone alarm offers a lot of nice features and easy of use. Good for an integrated solution, as it monitors your AV software to make sure it’s up to date and it even blocks some basic malicious mail attachments. The free version works well enough, I am pleased with it and if you’re interested in the paid version it offers many more features like cookie control and ad blocking. Get it at: www.zonelabs.com/

Kerio- Kerio offers ad blocking and very, very customizable controls. Kerio even goes so far as to manage what programs are allowed to launch other programs etc. I would definitely recommend Kerio to those users who want very customized firewall rules and tight control of operations on their box. Get it at: www.kerio.com/

Sygate- Sygate is a lot like zone alarm, you get your basic logging, inbound protection, and of course outgoing application control. Sygate also offers (like most firewalls) a professional version with more features. Get it at: www.sygate.com/

Outpost- Yet another great free firewall. This particular firewall comes very highly recommended out here at AO, it has many of the features of previously mentioned firewalls and there are dozens of threads on it so I will leave it at this. Get it at: http://www.agnitum.com/

Your other option if you choose to go the route of spending money is to purchase a router. Many routers now-a-days include SPI (stateful packet inspection) and NAT (network address translation) which can be invaluable in protecting your network. While this will solve a lot of your incoming threats it’s far from perfect and does not control your outgoing application communications. For this reason you may still want to use a software firewall even if you pick up a router. (Side note: plus aside from acting as a mini hardware firewall routers do allow you to network additional PC’s and share your internet connection amongst them, which is why I recommend it  )

The below link is to a post on AO about the most mentioned hardware and software firewalls, I recommend checking it out.
http://www.antionline.com/showthread...hreadid=257776

My 2 pesos
AzE