[Ramius]

Your Linksys router (depending on the model) may or may not have any hardware firewall capability.

As a general rule, I would recommend hiding ANY computer, regardless of OS, behind a decent firewall box of some kind. One good example might be the Netgear ProSafe series. They're not expensive, they are configurable and they'll do a pretty good job of hiding your home LAN from the Internet. Just remember to configure it away from the defaults, change the default passwords, and lock the outside world down, and you'll be in pretty good shape.

[Lloyd227]

Thanks Ramius, sounds like good advice.

In the meantime, I think I've located the feature on my router, under "filtering" it does allow up to 5 ports to be blocked and I've now done this.