I’ve had three routers go bad on me in roughly 6 months. I now go online (cable modem) with just ZoneAlarm. I do not have networked computers OR a wireless connection.
Does ZA provide good enough protection against hackers, or do I need that extra level of protection from a router?
Absolutely. The only time I’ve ever had trojan/hacker/worm/virus trouble were those very few times I shut down ZA for one reason or another and forgot to turn it back on.
There’s inbound and outbound issues.
Inbound, some random jerk trying to get into your system by port probing and such should be stopped cold if ZA is set up right.
However, if you click on that email promising a saucy picture of famous-ugly-celeb-of-the-month, you might get infected with a trojan and ZA won’t stop that. (Ditto installing iffy programs.) Then the trojan program starts doing bad outbound things. ZA may or may not pick that up. (Some programs even try to disable the more famous software firewall programs.)
At this point, it’s not all that worse from having a hardware firewall. But if the trojan is trying to set up certain types of servers, (e.g., an email forwarder, etc.), a hardware firewall is harder to remotely configure.
Note that serious, basically unfixable, problems have been found involving browsers and Javascript. So going to an infected site can cause all sorts of problems and no firewall is going to stop that. Again the issue is using ZA to partially help in learning you did something bad a couple days ago.
So you really need to be careful and monitor ZA logs and such.
In short, I feel about 3*safer with a hardware firewall.
I have never had a router do bad. But I always have my stuff on an APC with several surge protectors between me and line trouble.
I always run an router / switch on broadband even with a single computer.
Don’t forget to make a password for your router.