How to enable or disable the windows firewall in windows 7 ?

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.