Where are TCP/IP settings in Windows 7?

Transcript

In Win7, where can you find the TCP/IP settings to set a static IP
address?

Those suckers are buried – let me tell you! Let me go hide a couple things
here and I will show you. So they way that I get to them, you can see the
icon that I have down here that I have my mouse over is the network icon,
which represents the current network connection.

I’m going to right-click that; open Network and Sharing center and you can
see that it’s on this connection called Local Area Connection. Each physical
connection on your machine will probably have its own representation here.
You may have multiple networks and so forth.

This is the one we’re going to use. If I click on that, I now get Local
Area Connection Status. Great! It’s sending data; it’s receiving data. We
want Properties and right there is the TCP/IP v4 internet protocol driver.
Once again, Properties – finally, we get to a dialog that allows you to
specify to either obtain an IP address automatically, which 99% of you people
should do.

It’s the default for almost anything in the home and as you can see, it
defaults to that here. Or you can Use the Following IP address and this is
where you end up typing in your static IP address, Subnet mask, the default
gateway, and so forth.

In this same dialog box, you can see that it also allows you to either
obtain the DNS server automatically and DNS is the server that maps things
(like ask-leo.com) to its IP address.

In my case, you can see I’ve got it hard coded. You can set it to get the
address automatically at the same time that it gets its IP address or you can
say, ‘You know what? Ignore what it tells you. Use these for DNS.’ Now, in my
case, that first one 192.168.1.2 happens to be my Ubuntu Linux server down in
my basement. I have it set up to be my own local DNS server for all of the
machines on my network.

It’s a speed improvement for me; it means that 90% of my DNS requests never
actually have to go out on my slower internet connection. They can all get
resolved right here in my home. If I ask for something for the first time,
that DNS server knows to go search on the internet to find the answer.

That alternate DNS server – 4.2.2.2. I believe – that’s my ISP. It’s something
that the technician tossed in when he was diagnosing or setting up my
internet connection way back when. There are several DNS services you can
use; Google has an open one (4.4.2.2 or 4.4.4.4, I’m not even sure
anymore).

And the other that’s worth looking into is Open DNS which, again, it
claims to be one of the faster DNS services, but it also has the advantage of
if you set up an account with them, they actually will implement all sorts of
interesting filtering which can, especially if you’re a parent, prevent
access to malicious, pornographic, and other kinds of websites without your
having to do anything at all to your computer.

So anyway, that’s where it’s hidden. There are obviously different ways to
get here: Control Panel > Network and Internet > Network and Sharing
Center. You can also, I think, change adapter settings to all of your
different adapters. As you can see in this particular computer, I only have
one, but that will get you to the static IP settings.