Those are tests of outbound issues. Unless I get this completely wrong your pc needs to be penetrated for them to be issues and good (free) virus/malware protection will detect most of them. Most are using their firewall for inbound protection and zonealarm free does a good job in this space. Try this for a test: https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2
I use avast free on my trading computer and avg on my old personal computer. avast caught a trojan that avg didn't, hmm? Not saying avg is bad at at all. Recently I having been shutting down zone alarm free because I did a speed test and it kills my speed by 50% from my ISP, no kidding. I get 3 meg down with zone alarm and 7-8 meg down without. I run a lynksys blue box and it passed all leak test. Heck there 50 bucks and can do NAT. There's one other program you folks might want to check out. It's called Process Guard, search google, and it alerts you any time a program has been changed from it's original. Does some other stuff too.
Thats a surprise. I run zonealarm free on a amd 2600+ (fairly slow) with only half a gig of ram. I get 7 meg download without issues. Edit: You aroused my curiosity so I tried the ZDNet speed test. 7816 kbps with it and the same (both higher and lower by a fraction) without it.
Theres the key, NAT. Spend a few extra bucks and you are done. And the few extra bucks likely gets you other useful niceties, like MAC ID connection security, optional network name broadcasting, virtual DMZ (redirect specific port requests) and more. As for anti-virus. I use AVG FREE, have for years. But It's disabled (2 services, 2 registry "run" entries) on my XP trading box. I run it whenever...my datafeed only infects my mind, not my computer. For trojans, spyware, etc, I use Ewido Suite (which by sheer coincidence was recently purchased by Grisoft.) Again, I run it whenever. http://www.ewido.net/en/ No software firewall. If I suspect networking issues I use Ethereal http://www.ethereal.com/ to sniff it out. Or one of the free utilities from Sysinternals. http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities.html Osorico [NEVER had a virus or meaningful spy on a work computer] BTW, here's another goody... http://www.eicar.org/anti_virus_test_file.htm
forget about 50 bucks, it's free after rebates-a NAT in router,MAC filtering and if it not enough-there is bunch of software- http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1926995&CatId=1568
Norton and Mcaffee are awfull. Norton may be good, but it slows down your computer, no matter how powerful it is. It is bulky and has a lot of useless stuff. Mcaffee is a cheap program, that looks like a kid designed it. AVG is free and is very streamlined. It is fast and catches viruses, and is updated daily. You can pay for this and get better features. Trend Micro is also a good program.
Norton sucked too much resources and there are better programs that I use. I still have McAfee running only because it comes with my ISP. I don't know how useful it is and I haven't looked into how much resource it uses. AVG got rid of problems that McAfee didn't even find.
A final word on AVG ... program is Free and they send updates almost daily ..... you just cant beat that ....