Enable or disable the Windows Firewall in Vista

The Windows Firewall in Windows Vista cannot be quickly disabled or enabled. A user who wants to enable or disable it would have to open the Control Panel and load the Windows Firewall in the Security tab. The option to Turn the Windows Firewall on or off would appear in the menu. That’s not a practicable option if you have to turn it off and on several times a day, maybe every time you switch locations.

Hank (thanks a lot) send a tip via email that explained who to enable or disable the Windows Vista Firewall with a simple shortcut, or better two shortcuts. He was using this approach to disable the firewall at home where a hardware firewall was protecting the PC and to enable it while on the road with his notebook.

To create the shortcuts right-click the desktop in Windows Vista and select to create a new shortcut. Name the first shortcut Firewall OFF and the second Firewall ON. Use the following two commands to enable or disable the firewall.



Windows Vista Firewall OFF:

%systemroot%\System32\netsh.exe firewall set opmode disable

Windows Vista Firewall ON:

%systemroot%\System32\netsh.exe firewall set opmode enable

A click on Firewall OFF would turn the Windows Vista Firewall off immediately and a click on Firewall ON would enable it again. To get rid of the command line window in the background right-click the shortcut and select to run the command minimized like in the screenshot above. The default setting is normal window.