Changing your computer’s IP address becomes necessary in a few situations where you need to continue your daily internet activities on websites that you may have been banned from.

Change Your Computer’s IP Address if Banned

Maybe you have spoken your mind at a forum and the webmaster feels you violated forum rules. You may have been banned from a website such as eBay because of an unhappy customer through no real wrong doing on your part. Webmasters bar people from accessing their websites by banning their IP addresses.

What is an IP

The IP address provides identification of your computer’s network host as well as the location address of your computer to uniquely identify it.

Using the Command Prompt

If you like to use the command prompt more than the control panel interface, then you use a utility called “netsh” command built into the Windows operating system. You can use this command to tweak any aspect of your network connection. These instructions generally are for computers running Windows 10.

Step 1 – Press the “Windows” key with one finger and the letter “X” with another or just right-click with your mouse on the “Start” menu in Windows 10 and choose “Command Prompt (Admin).”

If you need to change your computer’s IP address on an older version of Windows, you can search for “command prompt” on the start menu and right-click the result to choose “Run as Administrator.”

Step 2 – You now need to find the full name of the network to which your computer is connecting to for the interface you want to change.

You can then change your IP address. Type the following command in your command prompt – netsh interface ipv4 show config

This results in Windows showing default names of interfaces like “Local Area Connection,” “Ethernet,” “Wi-Fi,” among others.

Step 3 – Scroll down in the command prompt window and find the one you’re looking for and note the exact name possibly in Notepad.

Step 4 – Now you will type the following at the command prompt – in the following format:

set address name=”YOUR INTERFACE NAME” static IP_ADDRESS SUBNET_MASK GATEWAY

For example:

netsh interface ipv4 set address name=”My Wi-Fi” static 192.168.3.8 255.255.255.0 192.168.3.1

This command makes changes to an interface named “My Wi-Fi”, sets the IP address to 192.168.3.8, the subnet mask to 255.255.255.0 and the default gateway to 192.168.3.1 if your computer’s IP address is static.

But if you want to change your computer’s IP address to dynamic where the server allocates a changing IP addresses to your computer every time you connect to the network, then type the following command:   

netsh interface ipv4 set address name = “My Wi-Fi” DHCP

Conclusion

As you can see from the process just outlined, changing your computer’s IP address using the command prompt in Windows operating system, is a straightforward process and easy to accomplish.