what is a firewall?if it is off can it harm my computer?

Question

I have notice when my firewall is off my com is fast, but when on its like dial up

Answer 1

Think of a firewall in your computer as those used in buldings, like hosiptals. There are firewalls in these buliding to stop any fire from spreading to other parts of the bulding. So a firewall for your computer is to protect your computer from things that could harm it.

Answer 2

A firewall is designed to protect your computer from being hacked from outside sources. It can also alert you to programs trying to access the internet that may have been spyware, adware, viruses, etc. So it is a wall that things have to cross going in and coming out. This wall suposedly will alert you to this activity. It will not stop viruses that are dowloaded with other items that you thought you could trust. You can pick up these viruses from videos especially. My experience also is that a firewall does slow down your internet speed. A firewall constantly writes to your hard drive while doing everything else and has caused premature failure to many of my hard drives. In light of this I still prefer to use one because it does have some protection and helps you know you are being hacked or have picked up a virus. You need to know how to use your firewall properly also; so study the help files with whatever firewall you have. Read it and read it until you understand it. Firewalls are necessary because we live in a world of stupid vindictive people that are pathetic. They are also motivated by greed and immature fantsy.

Answer 3

Firewall does not harm but it makes your system and internet a little slower than before installation.

It keeps running in the process as soon as you start your computer. If you want to disable it, go to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services and Disable firewall settings there.

Answer 4

When you connect to the Internet, you're using the protocol TCP/IP. Connections to a computer in tcp/ip use a concept called ports. Servers grab a known port number when they start up, and clients that want to talk to them do so by trying to connect to that well known port.

In a classic sense, the main thing firewalls do is block access to a computer's ports, so that other computers can't connect on any ports that aren't intentionally open.

As to why your computer runs slow with your firewall on, that could be any number of things. A firewall shouldn't slow down your internet use in any significant way, so that might be an indication your computer is underpowered, or your firewall isn't a particularly good one.

Answer 5

Firewall is NOT antivirus. A firewall CAN prevent viruses from infecting your computer by monitoring network traffic and blocking requests on specified internet ports. The Windows firewall works decently, but I would suggest something like ZoneLab's ZoneAlarm firewall. It is customizable by program and internet address. I would also suggest running separate antivirus software.

Answer 6

uhm... A firewall is either a piece of hardware or a software application that filters unwanted network traffic. Many software firewall applications will have virus scanning built in, but essentially, a firewall is not designed to protect you against viruses.

A firewall can be configured to possibly detect and filter unwanted traffic, and you can create rulesets to deny traffic to known addresses.

A firewall can also be used to create VPN access, so that you can bypass its rulesets to remotely connect to a computer that is behind the firewall.

Also, as to your system slowing down. With a software firewall, the unwanted traffic actually does reach your system before it is denied. It essentially is denied the access to interact with your network applications. It does require the use of some of your CPU and memory resources to deny this traffic.

Answer 7

As the name suggests it is a wall between your computer and the internet or any other network. It protects your pc from unauthorised attempts to connection.

If you are using windows OS and connceted to internet you must enable firewall.

Answer 8

firewall keeps off viruses...

if it is off, it does not do any harm to the com, but a virus may get in your com.

Answer 9

first of all many of the folk that are answering question on the following want to provide-up and admit that they do no longer know something about pcs. Turning of the laptop with the help of urgent the means button on the case can harm it. it truly is what leaded to not straightforward stress Faller and search for mistakes. it truly is going to surely be executed if each thing else does no longer artwork. So please enable homestead windows close down the laptop.

Answer 10

Its like a wall that circles around a virus and trapes him so that your antivirus gets him easyer.Its recomended that u ceep it on.