Connecting Windows XP to Multiple Networks

Having a notebook or laptop provides the freedom to be truly mobile. You can work in many places and situations. But this brings an annoyance: if you move your notebook between various different networks, you always have to change network settings.

If your company network uses TCP/IP protocol and a network server, then you will have your notebook most probably configured to get the IP-address via DHCP:

Properties of the Network connection :

you should see that your TCP/IP-address was "Assigned by DHCP"

You carry your notebook home and connect it to your home-network, to exchange some files with other computers used in your family. Most probably there will be no server installed at your home or another system able to act as DHCP-server, so Windows XP ( like Windows98, WindowsME and Windows 2000) will now assign an Automatic IP-address:

If all other systems at home are also configured to use this Auto-IP-Address generation, then you can use the network without having to reconfigure the TCP/IP-settings on your notebook.

But if you use at home manually assigned IP-addresses (example: 192.168.1.x- range), then you are required to adjust on your notebook the IP-address to match it up with the IP-address range used at home.

You have to do this manually on previous versions of Windows. Windows XP allows you to automate this step: In the Properties of Networking, display the Properties of your LAN network connection ,
display the Properties of the TCP/IP-protocol and select the tab "Alternate Configuration" :

By default, Windows XP will assign an IP-address via Automatic IP-address generation, if no DHCP-server was located on the network. You have now the possibility to change this, to define to use a "User Defined" setting, allowing to define a static IP-address to be used in case that no DHCP-server was located :

This will be indicated in the "Status" of your LAN connection: