Yesterday we talked about viewing the current firewall rules, and today the time has come to see how these rules can be changed, using the advanced interfaced introduced in my previous article on this topic. Of course that if you simply allow or deny when the firewall asks you to decide what to do with a certain application asking to create a connection to the Internet, things work pretty well, but what if you block by mistake your email client, for example?

I'll go along with the scenery above, and show you how to change an existing rule. These being said, let's go!

- First of all, let's open the advanced interface of the Windows Firewall by pressing the Start Orb, typing "firewall" in the search bar, and then clicking the item called Windows Firewall with Advanced Security.


- In the window that opens, click on Inbound Rules or Outbound Rules, both located in the left pane.


- Right click an item from the list and choose Properties.

- In the General tab, you can change the action performed by the current rule, as you can see in the screenshot below.


- In the Advanced tab, the Interface Types settings allow you to have different options set for a certain program, depending on the network interface used (for example, you can block a certain program to connect to the Internet, but allow it to create connections on your local network).


- At last, using the Scope tab allows you to apply a certain rule only to specific addresses, both for your computer and the remote location.


Today, we covered another small part of the Windows Firewall topic, but there's still enough to go. Anyway, I'll leave this aside for a while and give you tips and tricks covering the entire Vista universe, because there's a lot to know...

One of the good things in Vista is the firewall, a huge step forward from the one included in Windows XP. Despite the fact it won't pass all leak tests, this security tool included in all Vista versions does its job pretty well, and since first thing to do is check current settings, before changing them, today I'll show you how to view the current rules...

- To bring up the advanced interface of the Windows Firewall, press the Start Orb, type "firewall" in the search bar, and then click the item called Windows Firewall with Advanced Security.


- In the window that opens, expand the Monitoring branch, located in the left pane.


- Left click the Firewall item and check the list with active firewall rules.


- To get more details, right click an item and choose Properties, but be aware that you won't be able to change anything at this time.

The next logical step is to change these advanced rules, and also add new ones as needed, but this is what we're going to learn in the near future, so stay tuned!

If you have enough time at your disposal, exploring Vista is a pretty interesting experience, especially since you may bump into some strange problems, as I did. Since after a little research I discovered that the issue I encountered is a system bug, I decided to let you know more about it, too.

As you can see in the screenshot below, in my Device Manager I have an entry next to a yellow exclamation mark. This is the problem I was talking about, so let's see if you have it or not, first of all...


<-234x60 Half Banner - left->The good part is that some computers don't have this problem, and discovering the truth takes only a minute.

- First of all, press the Start Orb, type "device" in the search bar, and then click the Device Manager.


- Expand the Network adapters section and see what you got there.


- If you have an entry like the one in the screenshot above, starting with "isatap", don't try to update driver or remove it, because after the next reboot this is going to be back.

For other similar problems, try to do the following things - update the existing driver, remove the device and then scan for hardware changes, and be sure to do some research on the Internet for your problem. If you noticed this ISATAP bug on your Vista computer too, please don't forget to drop us a comment!

Unfortunately, the only thing that can be done about it, at this time, is to ignore the error message, as there is no fix announced to be on the way, because Microsoft didn't bother to fix it since March, as you can see on the official support page...