A hardware firewall is going to be better in the aspects of blocking all requests that you are not expecting. A scenario would be you are running a mysql server on the inside of your network and you don't want anyone from outside getting direct access to it, this request will never make it to your sql server and that server will not spend that extra time and bandwidth, even though its little on denying that request.
The advantage of a personal firewall installed on your computer is that it will monitor your requests and incoming requests at the same time. So if you request a site, the software firewall is more likely to only let that one site through and nothing else. A hardware firewall will see the request and allow whatever the response is back in completely as where a software firewall may block some of the incoming data that is could be harmful.
Its been about 3 years since I learned about the advantages and disadvantages, but if I remember right, I think I got it right.
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