4 Essential Things That you need to Successfully Connect to the Internet

Now that I finally stabilized my blog and hopefully I won’t be changing my theme that often as I been doing, I would like to concentrate on troubleshooting guide series to write full procedures on how regular users can troubleshoot their own problems with their computers. By no means I want to set myself up as the high priest of networking, I know that is only through community and knowledge sharing that we can achieve better solutions. I hope this is helpful for anyone who reads it, who apparently is only me for now, and please participate if you think you know something that we are missing here. We are going to start today by understanding how computer Internet connection works and how to troubleshoot it when there is a problem.

To successful have Internet connection on a computer you need 4 things to be setup correctly, and those are;

IP address
Subnet Mask
Default Gateway
DNS

And of course you need to have a good working cable connected from your computer to the Router .You normally get these settings when you are using a router, which get assigned dynamically to your computer using a program called “DHCP” don’t worry about terminologies used in these tutorials, you don’t basically need to understand them in full to fix common problems. To check these settings are correct, go to my network Places on your desktop or menu bar and right click it and go to Properties, right click on “My local Area Connection“ and go to properties again, on the “Local Area Connection” window choose and select “Internet protocol TCP/IP and click on properties, if you are using a router and the “Internet Protocol TCP/IP Properties” looks like the picture below;

Your settings are fine; both “Obtain an IP address automatically” and “Obtain DNS server address automatically” need to be checked, this only applies if you are using a router with “DHCP” server enabled, if you use more than one computer on this router, or have wireless access you more likely have DHCP enabled, but if your computer plugs directly from your cable or DSL modem you probably need to setup the above configurations manually, you will need to call your ISP for the IP, Subnet mask, default gateway, and DNS to use they might also help you to configure it too.

After you check these settings and you find they are correct, close out of all the windows and go to “START>RUN> type CMD and then hit ENTER, on the DOS prompt type “ipconfig /all” what comes up should look like this,

When you are using a router with DHCP your IP address always start with 192.168.X.X your subnet mask is 225.255.255.0 this is what they call class “C” network, and your default gateway is like 192.168.1.1 etc. DNS is almost always the same as the default gateway. If the numbers look fine to you, but still don’t have Internet connection, do “ipconfig /release” to release the current settings and type “Ipconfig /renew” to get a new IP address. Try the Internet and see if it works.