Choosing a firewall and an intrusion detection system has always been an appealing decision. Although many existing studies focus on which ones to choose by employing performance analysis for different software, there is one question that remains tangential to the literature: “What is the impact of such software on the performance of a day-to-day user computer?” This study offers a fresh and novel outlook to the existing literature by answering the above-mentioned question and shifting the perspective from enterprise level systems towards home computers. This is done by employing a thorough testing methodology and statistical analysis with regard to multiple different security software and operating systems: GData and Avast One Firewall for Windows and Snort for Ubuntu. The results show that, indeed, all security software have an impact on the performance of the system, but not in equal measures and not in all metrics studied.