Firewall Rules

PCs & Laptops For Dummies

When you allow or block a program through the firewall on your Windows PC, you create a firewall rule. Windows presets a bunch of firewall rules, and some programs create rules when they're installed. To view the list of rules, follow these steps:

Tap the Windows key and type Windows Firewall.
Choose Windows Firewall Control Panel from the search results. The Windows Firewall window appears.
On the left side of the window, click the Advanced Settings link. The Windows Firewall with Advanced Security console appears.

The center part of the console window lists basic firewall actions. These actions say the same thing: Disallowed inbound or outbound connections are blocked. To see more specifics, choose a category such as Inbound Rules from the left side of the window, illustrated here.

Firewall rules.

Each program or service features an inbound rule, outbound rule, or both. The rule can be enabled or disabled, or it can be deleted to remove the rule and have the firewall prompt again for access.

The details shown in the Windows Firewall with Advanced Security console are nerdy. Yet it's a useful location if you mistakenly allow a program and want to block it again: Select the program's rule and press the Delete key to remove it.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.