Do you have any more of your knowledgeable recommendations, suggestions, opinions, heck anything!! Thanks for your assistance.
Glenn
First of all, forget about Gibson research and their obsession with PING! :) It is not security relevant. Most especially not if you are behind a router firewall.
If you are behind a router firewall, a ping, or indeed any other access attempt of any sort, can not reach your machine. Unless the router has been expressly programmed to open a port, or you are using a tunneling protocol, NOTHING can directly access your machine.
You are worrying too much for no good reason. My advice in this case would be to do nothing at all. The router you have is a good solid piece of equipment with no known issues.
If you have your machine set up properly with an anti-virus program, then you have nothing much to worry about. All you have to be careful of is scam e-mails and similar, which you can effectively combat using this;
Mailwasher Free Spam Filter Software: The Reliable Free Spam Blocker | MailWasher - Mailwasher Free
This software deletes them on your provider server before they even reach your machine. Once set up it is absolutely reliable. In my opinion the best system available.
I have been using this for years. I got a free life-time licence as one of the original beta-testers. The freeware only works on ONE mail account. If you have more than one account you need the paid version.
Also, you must be careful what you click on or download, and you should check any sites you use with this;
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/fir...-kidsafe-site/
I don't bother with the toolbars etc . I just look at the results it gives me when I am searching Google for instance.
If you are uncertain about any download, then submit it here;
VirusTotal - Free Online Virus, Malware and URL Scanner
BEFORE you download it.
Don't use any torrent or other peer to peer "sharing" software, it is always dangerous.
If you do all that then you are as safe as anyone can be on the Internet, and certainly have no cause for excessive worry.
I usually scan my machine about once a week with
Malwarebytes, just in case I may have made a mistake somewhere. And I use
Avira AntiVir Personal - Free Antivirus free antivirus software.
I have not had a virus or anything like that on any of my machines for years. ( Unless I put it there on purpose! For testing or similar).
Regards....Mike Connor