Personal Firewall lets you choose how you want to be notified about allowing or blocking programs that require Internet access. Personal Firewall also lets you manage how your PC handles programs trying to access the Internet at startup, how it communicates with other PCs, how it handles intrusion attempts from hackers, and even how it reports on your security vulnerabilities.
| • | Set Smart Advice to decide automatically You can set Smart Advice for Personal Firewall to allow or block programs automatically, and to alert you only about unrecognized and potentially dangerous programs. This is a good option when you want comprehensive protection with little administration on your part. |
| • | Set Smart Advice to ask me to decide You can set Smart Advice for Personal Firewall to ask you to decide whether to allow access each time a potentially dangerous program tries to access the Internet. Smart Advice also displays a recommendation to help you decide. This setting is a good option when you want to be closely involved in your security administration, or when you are aware of programs that you want to manually allow or deny access to the Internet. |
| • | Turn off Smart Advice When you turn off Smart Advice, the alerts you receive do not include any recommendations about how to handle Internet access for programs. Personal Firewall only blocks a program from accessing the Internet automatically if the detected program is suspicious or known to be a threat. |
| • | Change startup settings When you turn on your PC, it goes through a startup routine before all programs, including Personal Firewall, become fully operational. During this time, some of the programs on your PC might attempt to access the Internet. By default, we allow some programs to have Internet access during startup to ensure that they run smoothly after startup. If you block Internet access at startup, some programs--such as networking programs--might not work correctly after startup. |
| • | Change settings for ping requests You can allow your PC to be seen by other PC users on your network by allowing ICMP ping requests, which are communications from one PC that test if another PC is reachable over a network. You should allow ICMP ping requests if you want other PCs to be able to communicate with your PC, or if you are trying to troubleshoot a networking issue. |
| • | Change settings for UDP tracking The User Datagram Protocol is one of the protocols used for Internet access, allowing applications to send and receive information with low processing overhead, in the form of datagrams. |