I was on-site at a company a few days ago and was asked to assist the office manager in setting up a new employees computer. The office manager followed their notes, but was unsuccessful in getting this computer connected to their local network and the internet.
My investigation was started to see what was wrong and I first asked if the other computers in the office were good on the internet and local network – they were. Next, I started checking the network settings for the network adapter of the computer. As I was checking settings, a Windows system message appeared on the screen which warned that there was an IP address conflict. Any device on a computer network requires a unique IP address address and this network was violating this rule. I noticed the IP address was set to static on this computer while the other computers were dynamic. This means the other computers were getting their IP address assigned to them from a DHCP server and this problem computer’s address was manually set by a human. The manually set one happened to conflict with one of the dynamic ones on the network and until corrected, this computer was not working on the network. I changed the IP from static to dynamic and the network and internet worked like a champ. We could see the other network resources like folders and printers. Internet web browsing was working as well.