I had shown about the Microsoft phone home thing. Completely spaced on telling you about an affordable and effective hardware firewall. It’s a Cisco RV110W. Price had dropped considerably on them. You can find them for around $50 now.

It’s a 10/100 switch with four ports and WPS as well as firewall capability. The interface is a web GUI. A word of advice – rename the administrator account and set at a minimum a 12-16 character password that includes upper and lower case, numbers and symbols. Then put it in your private notes – either on paper or an encrypted password safe on your computer.

And you can even have it mail logs to you daily. Just to see what’s going on. That’s a really nice feature. I just pump mine through Cox SMTP server and to my gmail account. Then I have a filter setup in Gmail to route the message to my Firewall Logs folder.

Keep it safe out there.