It's hard to decide whether or not I should have a firewall on my home network. There are two types of firewalls – hardware and software. A hardware firewall is built into the router you use for your internet connection, while a software firewall runs on your computer. You can also have both! If you already have a router, leaving the Windows Firewall enabled provides you with security benefits with no real performance cost. Therefore it's a good idea to run both. The best option is to keep all active at once because they complement each other so well that together they provide an extremely high level of protection against malicious attacks from outside sources as well as viruses and malware infections from inside your own network