Windows Defender Firewall

I can't turn on Windows Defender Firewall and when I look in services.msc, it's not there.

Windows Defender is disabled, possibly for a setting that I changed a while back and forgot about, to prevent conflicts with an AV and third party firewall I used to use, but I don't remember removing Windows Defender Firewall.

I got rid of my third party firewall (COMODO) as per suggestion to a computer tech that saw some conflicts with that and my AV (AVAST). I told him that I only got the firewall edition, and that I added exclusions to both programs, but said that it must have been the internet security pack that had AV protection as well on COMODO, because it's causing the CPU to peak with AVAST and COMODO trying to override eachother.

That aside, I was trying allow windows to automatically turn on Windows Defender Firewall, but a notification from the Action Center is showing in the system tray that I need to turn it on. When I try to turn it on, it says it cannot turn on and I need to do it manually. When I do that, in the Control Panel, I see that I need to re-enable, the "Recommended Settings", via admin permission.

When I try to allow to change to the recommended settings, I get an error code.

That's when I noticed that Windows Defender Firewall was missing from services.

Edited by sirMAXX, 10 April 2018 - 04:24 PM.

Hi sirMAXX,

It's actually just the Windows Firewall.  It's separate and apart from Windows Defender.  And it is normal and preferred for the latter to be disabled when you install a third party antivirus like Avast.  Sounds like your security programs are playing havoc with each other--it's a common issue.  Did you run Comodo's removal tool?

Let's run two analyzing tools to get a bit more information about what might be the problem.  When you download them, save them somewhere where you can find them. The desktop is convenient and easy to find, but you may want to save them elsewhere if you are familiar with navigating through files and folders.

1.  Download MiniToolBox to your preferred location (folder) then double click to open it.

2.  Click in the boxes to put checkmarks next to the following entries:

  List last 10 Event Viewer Errors
  List Installed Programs
  List Users, Partitions and Memory size

3. Copy the contents of the log that appears and then paste it into your next reply.

4.  Download Speccy and save it to your preferred location.

5.  Right click on spsetup128.zip and choose Extract All.

6.  Open the spsetup128 folder and double click on Speccy64.exe to open Speccy if you are on a 64-bit system.  If you are still running a 32-bit system, run by clicking on Speccy.exe instead.

7.  When Speccy opens it will take a few quick seconds to run.  When the moving circle at the bottom left hand side stops moving, it is done.

8.  Now click File, then Publish Snapshot.

9.  Click Yes, then Copy to Clipboard.

10.  Post the link to your Speccy data in your next reply to this topic, along with the MiniToolBox log. 

Edited by Papakid, 12 April 2018 - 12:23 AM.