Turning windows firewall off

happyhero

Hi my daughter has bought a new laptop with Vista basic on it and we are using it wirelessly on our home network. It has the firewall enabled but I have a Belkin Modem Router which has a built in firewall, as I remember you should only have one firewall active but can someone tell me is this correct and if so what do I do with the windows firewall, ie I have turned it off but now I keep getting a "Check your firewall status" warning from windows on the laptop.

Is there a way to to sort this out so that I get no warnings, or have I done anything wrong.

Any help appreciated.

f1charlie

You should only have one firewall active on your computer. As the firewall in your router is a separate entity, you can run the windows firewall on your computer without a problem.

superscaper

You shouldn't have two SOFTWARE firewalls, you should keep the windows firewall turned on (unless you install an alternative).

daku

hey
im having a similiar problem with windows vista, i have installed norton with spyware and firewall, but i keep getting a security center warning that my firewall and virus protection is switched off:mad:

any solutions??

Chippy_Minton

daku, in Security Centre click 'Change the way Security Centre alerts me' and untick the Firewall option. Vista, like XP, doesn't detect that some 3rd party firewalls are being used.

JamesUK_3

Anything earlier than Norton07 don't work properly with Vista due to them being written before it was released.

if you are using an earlier version, you may not actually be being protected by it.

Enterprise_1701C

We have a Linksys firewall router and it works fine with the Windows XP firewall. We are however cabled (we live in a cul-de-sac and don't fancy trying wireless with everyone else within range!), though that should make no difference.

superscaper

Jane_Blackford wrote: »

(we live in a cul-de-sac and don't fancy trying wireless with everyone else within range!)

I'm not sure why other people being in range would put you off wireless. If you secure a wireless network as you're meant to then nobody else could access it anyway.

ckerrd

Were I live I often have 5 different, secure networks around me, but obviously can only log into mine and noone else can get in

happyhero

Ok thanks for all the info guys but will I be at any risk if I turn the windows firewall off if I have the router one active?

I ask this because once or twice in the past when I activated windows firewalls as well as router firewall, I have found that the cabled pc and the wireless laptop we use connected fine to the internet but had problems seeing the folders on the other pc even though I had set them up to be available to see. It was as if the two machines were both happy with the router but wouldn't let each in to each other because the windows firewalls were blocking entry. I knopw the folders were set up ok as I had accessed them from the other pc several times before.

superscaper

Personally I think you would. I wouldn't risk not having a software firewall. The way I see it is that a router's firewall is more for protection of the network whereas the software firewall is to protect your individual pc. A router firewall I don't think would stop any outgoing traffic being sent by any malicious software on your pc. If you are having problems accessing folders then that's down to the firewall settings and setting the firewall to trust the other computers in the network.