How to find open ports on a computer

The ports of a computer, are a kind of barriers that we find in computing, to prevent access to our equipment. This type of barrier is also available in routers and its purpose is the same as in our team: avoid unauthorized access.

Natively, there are some ports like 8080 that are always open in all operating systems as well as routers, since it is one of the most used by applications and browsers to connect to the internet. However, there are other types of ports less known and used.

How to find open ports on a computer

A few years ago, in order to download movies, it was necessary to open a series of ports both on our router and on our computer for the application to work. As of today, most downloads are made through a browser, so it no longer makes sense to allow access to certain ports to applications, so it is recommended check which ports of our equipment are open.

To check which ports are open on our PC, it is not necessary to install any application, although you must know how to decipher the information that the command offers us. netstat -a with which we can find out what are the open ports of our team.

To execute this command, we must access the command prompt by typing CMD in Cortana’s search box. In the window that appears, write netstat -a.

This process can take a few seconds so you have to be patient. The list that is shown shows us that ports are open right after the IP of our computer on our network. This trick is compatible with practically all versions of Windows from Windows 98, where it was quite common to have to open ports to download content from the internet.