If you have multiple network adapters or you frequently do a lot of network setting changes, you may pine for the nice little network status icons that were in windows XP. Today I’ve been reconfiguring a bunch of CCTV transmitters that involved rolling back firmware in the devices. Every time you do this, they reset to their default IP address. Needless to say, this is on a completely different subnet to the one they were configured on, and it’s also different to the one I need to change them to.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve changed the IP address on one of my network cards today. Anyway, partly through the job I got sick of the long winded, dumbed down method in windows 7 and installed a little bit of freware called “Gab Net Stats“. This gives you a network status icon which gives you instant access to the network configuration for any of your connected network adapters.
It’s only one icon for every network adapter, rather than one per adapter as in XP, but it’s still a lot quicker and easier to get to your netwok configuration than the standard windows 7 method. It will only be useful for fewer than 0.1% of windows users, but I’m keeping it!