Windows 7 by default will not reply to pings coming from outside of a trusted network. This is because of a slight security enhancement to keep your desktop a bit more concealed when connected to the internet. Unfortunately me, among others generally would rather have this working so we can determine if a device is running or not.

One thing that irked me was that I could not find a very quick way to enable this, there are plenty of tutorials, don’t get me wrong. But of all these tutorials most of us just want a quick fix.

Here is a script to enable this for you. It runs the following command as administrator:

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule protocol=icmpv4:8,any dir=in action=allow name="ICMP: Global Reply [ping] (ICMPv4-In)" description="Allows this device to reply to IPv4 ICMP echo requests." profile=any interfacetype=any

Feel free to run that yourself, or try this script which does it all.

Windows 7 Ping Reply Script (295kb)

Source Code (AutoIt)

1 Comments

  • # RobertJanuary 3, 2016 at 12:34 am

    Thanks for describing useful windows 7 ping reply tool. Well described. I’m a windows 7 user.