If you have entered your IP address, when you click on the subnet mask field, windows will automatically fill in the default subnet mask for the class of IP address that you entered in the IP field.

Now you will have to enter your default gateway. Think of the gateway as being on the edge of your network. It will regulate the flow of data between your network and the other network. In our home, the other network is usually the internet. On a home network, your default gateway will most likely be your router. The IP address of my Linksys router is the default of 192.168.1.1 so I will put it in. Other brands of routers may use a different IP address as the default (or you could have changed it), you may have to check the documentation.

Now we will have to enter the DNS information. DNS stands for Domain Name System. A DNS Server will take a domain name like google.com and translate it into an IP address. Some people don’t realize that every web site we access on internet is actually an IP address. There is no way we could remember the IP address for every web site, so DNS was created to do the work behind the scenes for us.

You have the option to enter a Preferred and Alternate server. On my home network the router is also my DNS server so I will enter it as my preferred server. You do not have to enter an alternate but can if you know the IP address of the server you would like to use.

You can click ok to save your static IP address settings.

Now there are more advanced configurations that you can use. For example, if you want to use a DHCP IP address but want to use a different name server you can do that by clicking “Obtain IP Address Automatically” and then selecting “Use the following DNS server” and entering your DNS info.

If you click on the advanced button you can assign multiple IP addresses, default gateways, DNS servers and WINS servers. You can also adjust TCP/IP filtering and some more DNS options. Go ahead and explore the options, just remember how they were before you started.

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