Technology

A firewall is a software or hardware base solution to filter the incoming and outgoing traffic of your computer or network. All the entering or leaving traffic from your computer pass through the firewall, which inspect the all types of traffic and either allow or deny the traffic depending upon the firewall settings. Microsoft includes the built-in firewall feature in all latest windows operating systems like windows XP, Vista and now in windows 7.

Follow the given steps to configure built-in firewall in windows 7:

To use this feature, you will need to be logged into your computer with administrative rights.

First click on Start button and then click on Control Panel option.

Now in Control Panel click on “System and Security” link to go next.

On next page, you can see the firewall link “Windows Firewall”, Click on this link to configure the firewall.

There are many options on the left side panel of this page regarding firewall configurations under “Allow a program or feature through Windows Firewall”, For example

• Change notification settings

• Turn Windows Firewall on or off

• Restore defaults

• Advanced settings

On the right side panel, you can see the two types of link for firewall settings, For example

• Home or Work (Private) networks

• Public networks

Now in left side panel, click on Change notification settings to customize the firewall settings.

By default windows firewall is on for both private and public network, here you can turn off the default firewall policies.

To allow the default or recommended settings either click on the Use recommended settings button on the right pane or click on the Restore default link on the left side panel.

Here click on the Restore default button and a restore defaults confirmation message will be opened, Click on Yes button.

But if you are a expert user then you can use the Advance Settings link on left side panel to configure the advance firewall settings for inbound and outbound traffic according to your need.

Click on the Inbound Rules link in the left side panel. You can see here a list of all Inbound Rules is displayed. On clicking an enabled rule, a list of actions is shown in the Actions Pane. Click on Disable Rule to disable the selected rule. You can also Cut, Copy and Delete the rule.

Same here Outbound Rules for outgoing traffic.