? Vista Firewall equal or better than outside sourse firewal

The Vista Firewall is certainly more advanced than XP's and it seems to gives at least measurable but minimal protection if you do not have any other options available to you. However, I would always suggest a router or hardware solution if possible, followed up by a 3rd party source on the PC. This way you don't have to worry about an update or service disabling it in the background and first finding out about it in the logs. Stay away from Symantec for the most part because of the known vulnerabilities (future versions for Vista may get better), and I have never seen fatastic press for Kaspersky. Zone Alarm seems pretty tried and true. In the end, its up to the user based on how much you know about what you want in a firewall and how much you want to mess with it.