For most places I’ve worked and lived, simply plugging in some CAT 5 between my computer and a wall socket will serve me up some piping hot SDMB in an instant*.
This is not the case now. At work, that’s what I do, but not at my apartment. There, I have to modify my TCP/IP properties so that rather than autoaquiring whatever numbers go in there, I have to type 6 addresses in. This is a pain, since I use my laptop both at work and at home. I don’t like having to type this stuff in every time I go home.
Is there an easy way to avoid having to do this? I tried setting up different profiles in Windows XP, but these setting seem to be global. Can Windows do this? If not, is there a program (preferably free) that can do this?
*somtimes I have to register my computer or some such nonsense, but after that it’s quick.
Ok, so it costs $19.95. It does do exactly what you want. You can store multiple network configurations and switch between them. Most of the time, you don’t have to reboot your computer. It’s perfect for switching from DHCP (what you called “just plugging in your computer”) to static IP or some variation (entering 6 IP addresses).
For each configuration, you can set up a display resolution, shares, proxies, and even default printers.If you have a laptop with built-in networking and WiFi, you can choose between the WiFi and Ethernet. You can also choose (to some extent) which startup apps are loaded.
I commend you for asking for a free solution. We should all encourage free software. Still, I can’t argue with charging for something that’s really well-written and useful; Netswitcher fits that bill. $20 is not too much to ask for it. I would not want to be writing and supporting networking software!
Thanks, that sounds like exactly what I need. I was hoping that there were just some hidden options in Windows that I hadn’t found, but $20 isn’t so bad. I’ll take a look.
I know this doesn’t help you, but my laptop came with a program that does that. In fact, it does one better. It seeks out a wireless access point (if I have wireless turned on), figures out based on the SSID where I am and reconfigures everything. So when I bring my computer to work, it logs on, know what printer to use etc, when I get home it finds my home WAP changes the printer to my home printer, it can even set different home pages for IE if I wanted it to. So yes, they do exist.
I don’t know the PC/XP world, but on the Mac you can set up a virtually infinite number of “Locations” each of which has its own IP configuration, and you switch between them by selecting a different location from the pop-out menu of locations from the Apple menu.
Back in the old days of System 7, you had to open the TCP/IP Control Panel and go to “Configurations” and change to a different configuration, but aside from accessing it differently it worked the same way. (MacOS 8 and 9 had the “Location Manager” and worked more like OS X).
Look around in your menus and control panel settings and see if there isn’t something similar built into XP. After all, folks on laptops have to deal with this all the time.
You can configure most aspects of the XP networking configuration using the command line tool “netsh”. For example, to set a static IP:
netsh interface ip set address name="Local Area Connection" source=static addr=192.168.1.102 mask=255.255.255.0
You can use the tool interactively, too. It’s a little complicated if you haven’t used a tool that operates this way, but basically, you type “netsh” and you get the netsh> prompt. Then you’re in the default “context”, and there is a set of commands that can be used in that context. You change contexts by typing the name of the context you want to switch to. For example, “interface” is a context where you can issue commands relating to network interfaces, and “interface ip” is a subcontext that lets you issue commands relating to the ip configuration of an interface. So the command line I gave you above is actually using the “set address …” command within the “interface ip” context.
The easiest way to figure out what commands you want is to configure the properties manually, then do a “netsh interface ip dump”, which will dump out the exact netsh commands that will configure the interface the way it’s configured right now.
Once you figure out the commands to use, then just stick one set in a “homeconfig.bat” and the other in a “workconfig.bat” file.
