I've recently changed jobs and I've been set up with a new workstation. On all previous places where I've been working they've had some sort of local firewall installed on each and every workstation - but here I've been told not to activate it because it is not necessary since we're already behind a HW Firewall.

To me this seem a bit naïve, but I cannot emphasise it. I always thought a local firewall was good practice, ie. if something managed to come through the hw firewall there might be a slight chance other computers on the lan would block the internal threath.

We got free access to internet and we got a virus checker installed.