How to Install a Firewall

While not many people understand how a firewall works – or even what they are – a firewall is an essential tool to help protect your computer against threats. You wouldn’t go out and leave your house unlocked, nor would you park your car for the day and not lock the doors. Neither should you leave your computer freely available to any bit of malware that happens to come by. Simply put, a firewall helps to lock your computer.

Actually, a virus or malware of some other kind doesn’t just happen. Your computer becomes infected when someone sends it to your address, or you download or open a file containing it. Data flows from the Internet into your computer and unfortunately, sometimes brings with it a nasty bug you didn’t expect.

A firewall will watch the entry points of your computer for these bugs and prevent them from coming in to your computer. There is hardware and software-based firewalls. A software-based firewall runs on the PC, while the hardware-based firewalls are integrated into gateway and router products, taking up a position between your PC and a connection point such as a DSL modem or cable. They are good for protecting networked computers since they hide the addresses, thus making your network invisible to outsiders. Even a lone PC will benefit from a hardware-based firewall.

Hardware firewalls are an excellent means of blocking unwanted traffic from your PC, but programming one is a lot of work. A software-based firewall is an excellent way of protecting any PC, but especially one that has a dial-up modem. It will stop unwanted traffic at the ports, and if malware should get through – or be there before you install the firewall – it will stop it from sending your private data to a remote service and will refuse incoming connections.

If you have Windows XP, you can enable the firewall that is integrated with it in the following manner. Click on Start, Control Panel, Network Connections. Right click on whichever Internet connection you want the firewall to protect.  Click Properties and Advanced. You will see an Option stating; protect my computer and network by limiting or preventing access to this computer from the Internet. Click OK.

Just remember that this is not the be-all and end-all of firewalls. In other words this firewall will need more to back it up because it only performs only one function – that of monitoring incoming connections.

There are plenty of no-cost or low-cost firewalls to be had; Sygate Personal Firewall 5.1 and Zone Lab’s One Alarm 3.7 are just two of them. So, the sooner you get one, the more quickly you’ll be fully protected.