How to Create a Shortcut Icon or Hotkey to Enable / Disable Windows Firewall

If you use Windows default Firewall, many times you might need to disable firewall for troubleshooting issues. To disable firewall, you have to follow no. of steps like opening Control Panel, then open Windows Firewall applet, then click on “Change Settings” and finally select “Off” and Apply it.

Its a lengthy process and it would be better if we could create a shortcut which can directly enable/disable Windows Firewall in a single click.

The Geek at “How To Geek” recently posted a great tutorial for creating shortcuts to enable/disable Firewall.

I’ll post a small summary of this tutorial here:

1. Right-click on Desktop and select “New -> Shortcut“.

2. It’ll ask for Location of the item. Type following command in the location box:

To Create Shortcut to Disable Firewall, use following command:

netsh firewall set opmode disable

To Create Shortcut to Enable Firewall, use following command:

netsh firewall set opmode enable

3. Click on “Next” button. Now provide a name and click on “Finish” button.

4. That’s it. It’ll create a shortcut on Desktop. Now you can change its icon, name, assign shortcut key by entering into shortcut’s Properties.

You can read the full tutorial with screenshots at following link:

Create a Shortcut Icon or Hotkey to Turn Windows Vista Firewall On or Off

I’m very thankful to “The Geek” to provide me permission to publish his article here. “How To Geek” is a well-known website and contains lots of good information. You should definitely take a look at this website and subscribe to the RSS feed.

What Next?

5 Replies:

Omi Azad said:

Still I want to stay away from Windows Firewall. I doubt that works.
VG said:

^^ lol. It works man. I’m using it in Vista.
happyandyk said:

i agree with vg, vista fw is great try it.

incidentally, there are more such firewall commands at http://forums.technet.microsoft.com/fr-FR/winservercore/thread/5a438757-d294-483d-8619-df9eb5700561/
VG said:

^^ Very useful link. Thanks.
marco said:

additional:
for WindowsXP Icon, use this file –> xpsp2res.dll

Thank’s