Selecting a Personal Firewall 

Selecting a Personal Firewall

The potential damages caused by stolen personal info like credit-card information far outweighs the purchase price of today's good Firewall software or hardware, its essential that you carefully select a good firewall and learn to set it up correctly.
The price difference between an inadequate firewall and a robust, effective firewall is minimal. It is more important to properly configure a good firewall than to buy the most expensive or complex.
Personal - If you just have one computer directly accessing the internet via a modem (Broadband connections are more susceptible to intrusions due to its always connected nature), it most cost effective to just use a good firewall software on that computer. A good software firewall is already configured to protect you from known threats and is updated automatically to tackle new threats. You may also want to consider proven firewall and antivirus suites . Save you money and easier configuration via a single user menu.
Small Office - If you have more than one computer that needs internet access in your office or home, you would most likely have some firewall like features built into your router. All hardware firewalls uses Network Address Translation (NAT) that shields internal network computers from the internet.
Alternatively, you can also install a software network firewall on your network access computer - gives much more control of firewall features.
Unfortunately, a hardware firewall does not provide much protection from worms, spy wares or Trojans that can shift confidential and damaging data out of one of your computers. You would need a software firewall on each individual computer for adequate protection these days.
Traveler - A software firewall is almost the only choice for notebook users - lugging an external firewall + power supply defeats having one of those nice Pentium-M lightweights. Also, software firewalls can be updated with tighter security features as fast as new threats surfaces. Many of today's security threats come from application level embedded codes (from emails or websites) that send confidential data to an external party.
We hope that the above will help your internet security shopping decision making.