Tuesday, March 5, 2013

How To View The Network Adapter Details In Windows

How To View The Network Adapter Details In Windows

network-adapter-thumbIf you are a network administrator or an advanced user, you probably have multiple network cards in your computer. This includes virtual cards used by virtual machine software. Digging deep into the device details can be a daunting process if you want to see the details about all the network adapters installed on your computer.

There are two ways to see detailed information about the installed network adapters in Windows:

1. Using System Information Tool

If you want to see detailed information about your network interfaces and adapters, you can use the system information tool which provides details about each network interface separately. To open system information tool, follow the steps below.

1. Go to “Run” and type “msinfo32” (in Windows 8, you can just search for “msinfo32?). This will open the system information tool. Please note that it may take a few moments before the actual data is displayed on the window.

2. Go to “Components -> Network -> Adapter”.

3. You can scroll through the list of adapters in the right hand pane.

network-system-information

To copy any line of information, just select the line and press “Ctrl + c”. This will copy the information to the clipboard. You can also export complete information about the network adapters by going to “File -> Export”.

< p>You can also get the same information using command line but the information will be less than the one provided by system information tool. To get network interface information through command line, just open command prompt and issue the following command:

This will show details about all the network interfaces, whether active or inactive.

network-cli

2. Using NetworkInterfacesView Tool

NetworkInterfacesView is a nifty portable tool from Nirsoft. The benefit of NetworkInterfacesView is that it makes use of the Windows Registry in order to get information about the active and inactive network adapters. It will list down both the network adapters which are being used right now and which have been used in the past o n the computer. It will give you three statuses of the devices:

  • Active devices will be shown with a green status icon.
  • Non-operational devices will be shown with a yellow status icon.
  • Disconnected devices will be shown with a red status icon.

network-networkinterfacesview

The default view of NetworkInterfacesView shows only a brief overview of all the network adapters. The view expands as you scroll horizontally. If you want to view detailed information about a particular adapter, just double click the adapter name and a new window will open with detailed information about the device.

network-device-properties

Another advantage of NetworkInterfacesView over the built-in system information utility is that it lets the user save information about individual adapters as well as exporting the complete network adapter information.

To save details about individual item, select the item and then select “Save selected item” from the File menu. To save details about all the listed items, select “HTML Report â€" All items”.

network-html-report

NetworkInterfacesView shows the following information about each network adapter:

  • Device Name
  • Connection name
  • IP Address
  • Subnet mask
  • Default gateway
  • DNS Servers
  • DHCP information
  • DHCP Servers
  • Instance ID
  • Instance GUID
  • MTU
  • Status
  • MAC A ddress

All this information can be obtained from the system information tool (msinfo32), but NetworkInterfacesView presents them in a manner that is easier to understand.

How do you see all your network devices’ properties?

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