5 Ways to Open Network Connections from CMD and Windows 10 GUI

In this guide you will learn how to open Network Connections on Windows 10 from CMD (Command Line), PowerShell, Run dialogue, Settings app and Control Panel.

Network Connections is a Control Panel applet but it is still actively used in Windows 10 because Microsoft has not developed its substitute in modern Settings app.

Admins and experienced users often need to launch the Network Connections applet for various purposes: change the IP-address for Wi-Fi or Ethernet connection, enable / disable IPv6, assign Google DNS for the current PC, etc.

No matter which method you use, you will see the same Network Connections applet open:

Open the Network Connections Applet Using Run Dialogue

You can open the applet using the command right from the Run dialogue without actually launching command line (a.k.a. cmd):

• Press Win+R key combination
• Type ncpa.cpl (you can copy and paste the command into the “open” field).
• Hit Enter or click OK:

Open Network Connections from CMD

• Press Win+R.
• Type cmd
• Hit Enter or click OK to launch Command Line:
• type ncpa.cpl
• Hit Enter:

Open Network Connections from PowerShell

Almost the same steps:

• Right-click the Windows 10 Start Button.
• Select Windows PowerShell or Windows PowerShell (Admin):
• Type ncpa.cpl
• Hit Enter:

Password Recovery

Network Connections is the most commonly used Control Panel applet for network administrators. From there you can view and manage all your wired / wireless adapters in one place. In this tutorial we’ll show you 3 quickest ways to open Network Connections in Windows 10.

Method 1: Open Network Connections via Run or Command Prompt

Press the Windows key and the R key at the same time to open the Run box. Type ncpa.cpl and hit Enter and you can access Network Connections immediately.

A similar way of opening Network Connections is to run ncpa.cpl at the Command Prompt.

Method 2: Open Network Connections via Taskbar

Right-click the network icon which is located at the notification area of taskbar, and then select “Open Network & Internet settings” from the popup menu.

In the resulting pop-up window, click the “Change adapter options” in the right pane.

It will open Network Connections in no time.

Method 3: Open Network Connections via Control Panel

Open the Control Panel in category view, click the “View network status and tasks” link beneath the “Network and Internet” heading.

In the resulting window, click “Change adapter settings” on the left-hand side.

Now you can view a list of network connections on your system.

Command Prompt (CMD) – 8 network commands you should know

Command Prompt proved itself to be one of the best tools for running basic commands that allow you to work with files and folders from Windows. However, the Command Prompt is much more powerful than just that. You can take things to the next level by running more than just a few advanced commands, including a range of handy network commands. Today, we’re going to learn how to use Command Prompt to check the internet connection, the network connections, view information about network devices, and watch connections between your PC and other devices. Without further ado, let’s begin:

NOTE: We wrote this guide using Windows 10 with November 2019 Update. However, all the commands illustrated work the same way in Windows 8.1 and Windows 7. Before going any further, if you don’t know how to open the Command Prompt, read: 11 ways to launch the Command Prompt in Windows.

1. How to check internet connection in CMD

To check whether your internet connection works, you can use Command Prompt to test your connection to a certain website or internet location. To do that, you can use the ping network command, followed by a web address or IP address. For instance, you can check the connectivity to Digital Citizen without opening a web browser, by typing the command “ping www.digitalcitizen.life.” Then press Enter on your keyboard.

If the ping statistics don’t show any loss of packets, your internet connection is working as it should. However, if you get lost packets, that means that either your internet connection is broken, or that the website you pinged is not online. To double-check your internet connection, ping at least another website, preferably one that it’s always on, such as www.google.com.

The ping command also allows you to use the handy “-t” parameter, which enables you to ping the specified address forever until it’s manually stopped. For instance, we typed “ping -t www.digitalcitizen.life.” After some time, we wanted to see some connection statistics and we used the keyboard combination “CTRL + Break.” This shows the averages of the ping commands run until then.

Finally, we terminated the command by using the keyboard combination “CTRL + C.” This stops the endless cycle of ping commands to the specified address.

2. How can I see all the network adapters on my computer using CMD?

To obtain detailed information about your network adapters and connections, use the ipconfig command. Open Command Prompt, type ipconfig, and press Enter. As you can see in the screenshot below, when you run this command, Windows displays the list of all the active network devices, whether they’re connected or disconnected, and their IP addresses. You also get details such as their default gateway IP addresses, subnet masks and the state of each network adapter.

If you add the /all switch to the ipconfig command, you can get to a whole new level of detail: DNS information, the MAC (Media Access Control) (in the Physical Address field), and other information about each network component. Check out the picture below to see a sample of what you get from the “ipconfig /all” command.

3. How to check your network connection in CMD

If you want to check whether your network connection to the router is operating as it should, you can use a combination of the commands ipconfig and ping. First, get some cmd nic info about your adapter. In other words, open Command Prompt and run ipconfig. In the list of results, identify the network adapter that’s used for connecting to the network you want to test. Then, in its details, find the IP address of your router and note it down. For example, if we’d want to check our Ethernet network connection, we’d run ipconfig and see that our router’s IP address is 192.168.50.1.

The next step is to check that the network connection between the router and the computer is OK. To do that, it’s enough to run the ping command on the router’s IP address. In our example, that would mean that we have to run this command in CMD: ping 192.168.50.1.

If there are no packets lost, then the network connection tested is running well. Otherwise, there’s a problem somewhere between your computer and the router, in which case you should check that your PC’s network adapter is configured correctly, that the Ethernet cable is OK (if you’re using a wired connection), and that the router is configured properly.

4. How to renew the IP address of your network adapter

When your network connection doesn’t work as it should, your network adapter might not have the right IP address assigned. A quick way of trying to solve this issue is to renew its IP address and, fortunately, you can do that quickly, straight from the Command Prompt. Open CMD and run the following commands: ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew. The first one (ipconfig /release) forces your network adapter to drop its assigned IP address, and the second command (ipconfig /renew) renews the network adapter’s IP address.

Note that you can also instruct CMD to run both commands in one line by typing “ipconfig /release & ipconfig /renew,” without the inverted quotation marks. If you type them like this, Command Prompt executes the first command and, when it’s done, it automatically runs the second one. Cool, right? 🙂

The release and renew parameters are useful in networks that use DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) to distribute IP addresses automatically. Your system gives up its current address and requests a new one from the DHCP server, and that can help you troubleshoot certain network issues.

5. How to get nic info about your network adapter’s MAC addresses

One of the fastest and easiest ways to obtain the MAC addresses of your network adapters is to use the getmac command. In Command Prompt, type getmac and press Enter, as seen in the image below.

6. How can I see the computers and devices connected to my network using CMD?

In some cases, you might want to see what computers and devices are connected to the same network as you are. One of the easy and friendly ways to do that is to use the net view command. Launch Command Prompt and run net view. After a while, you should see a list of the computers and devices in your network.

However, there’s a caveat about this command. Net view doesn’t show all the computers and devices that are in the same network as you. Although it works well enough for private networks, it fails to identify devices such as smartphones or printers, and also has issues with computers that are running different operating systems. If you want to get a clear view of everything that’s connected to your network, you should also check the next command.

7. How can I see all the devices connected to my network using CMD?

The best way to find all the devices connected to the same network as you is based on using the arp command. Open Command Prompt and run arp -a. The IP address shown first, next to Interface, displays your network adapter’s IP address. Then, there’s a list of IP addresses and MAC addresses (Physical Addresses). All the IP addresses that start with the same numbers as your network adapter are in the same network and/or subnet as you are. They are all devices connected to your network.

The next ones are not real devices, but IP addresses used for multicasting. They are commonly used by your real devices for streaming media on your network. In our example, the devices connected to the same network as our computer are all the ones that have IP addresses starting with 192.168.50.

If you want to see what those devices are, in a more human-friendly way, copy their MAC addresses and look them up on the internet using Google or on websites that let you check which vendors assign certain MAC addresses, such as DNS Checker. For instance, if you’re looking for the MAC address 04-d9-f5-b5-b1-f0, you find that it’s a device made by ASUS. In truth, it’s an ASUS ZenWiFi router.

8. How to check your computer’s network connections and open ports

You can get other useful cmd nic info from the netstat command, which lets you see the network connections that are active between your system and any other systems on your network or the internet.

If you add the -a parameter to the netstat command, you can get a list with all the connections and listening ports, as seen in the image below.

Do you know other useful ways to get cmd nic info?

The networking commands that you can run in the Command Prompt can be useful when you need to find information about devices connected to your network or when you want to test your network connections state. They’re convenient also when you have networking issues, and you’re trying to troubleshoot them by yourself. If you have questions about these networking commands, if you need help, or if you want us to add others to the list, leave us a comment below.

11 networking commands every Windows admin should use

The Windows operating system contains numerous built-in, command line networking utilities. These tools range from the obscure to the commonplace. However, there are 11 built-in networking tools that Windows networking administrators should be familiar with.

I am guessing that the ping command is probably the most familiar, and most widely used of the utilities being discussed in this article, but that does not make it any less essential.

Ping is used to test the ability of one network host to communicate with another. Simply enter the Ping command, followed by the name or the IP address of the destination host. Assuming that there are no network problems or firewalls preventing the ping from completing, the remote host will respond to the ping with four packets. Receiving these packets confirms that a valid and functional network path exists between the two hosts.

NetStat

If you are experiencing problems with network communications, then network statistics can sometimes help point you toward the root cause of the problem. That’s where the aptly named NetStat command comes into play. This command has a number of different functions, but the most useful of these is to display network summary information for the device. To see this type of summary information, just type NetStat -e.

The ARP command corresponds to the Address Resolution Protocol. Although it is easy to think of network communications in terms of IP addressing, packet delivery is ultimately dependent on the Media Access Control (MAC) address of the device’s network adapter. This is where the Address Resolution Protocol comes into play. Its job is to map IP addresses to MAC addresses.

Windows devices maintain an ARP cache, which contains the results of recent ARP queries. You can see the contents of this cache by using the ARP -A command. If you are having problems communicating with one specific host, you can append the remote host’s IP address to the ARP -A command.

NbtStat

As I am sure you probably know, computers that are running a Windows operating system are assigned a computer name. Oftentimes, there is a domain name or a workgroup name that is also assigned to the computer. The computer name is sometimes referred to as the NetBIOS name.

Windows uses several different methods to map NetBIOS names to IP addresses, such as broadcast, LMHost lookup, or even using the nearly extinct method of querying a WINS server.

Of course, NetBIOS over TCP/IP can occasionally break down. The NbtStat command can help you to diagnose and correct such problems. The NbtStat -n command for example, shows the NetBIOS names that are in use by a device. The NbtStat -r command shows how many NetBIOS names the device has been able to resolve recently.

Hostname

The previously discussed NbtStat command can provide you with the host name that has been assigned to a Windows device, if you know which switch to use with the command. However, if you’re just looking for a fast and easy way of verifying a computer’s name, then try using the Hostname command. Typing Hostname at the command prompt returns the local computer name.

Tracert

Contrary to what a rather infamous YouTube video might lead you to believe, Tracert isn’t pronounced “Tracer T,” nor can it show you how many people are using Google right this second. Instead, Tracert, or “Trace Route,” is a utility for examining the path to a remote host.

Functionally, Tracert works similarly to Ping. The major difference is that Tracert sends a series of ICMP echo requests, and the request’s TTL increased by 1 each time. This allows the utility to display the routers through which packets are passing to be identified. When possible, Windows displays the duration and IP address or fully qualified domain name of each hop.

IpConfig

One utility that I find myself using constantly is IPConfig. At its simplest, the IPConfig command will display basic IP address configuration information for the device. Simply type IPConfig at the Windows command prompt, and you will be presented with the IP address, subnet mask, and default gateway that the device is currently using.

If you would like to see more detailed information, then type IPConfig /all. Doing so causes Windows to display IP address configuration that is much more verbose. This is also the command that you will have to use if you want to see which DNS server the Windows device is configured to use.

The IPConfig command can do much more than just display IP address configuration information. It also contains options that can help you to troubleshoot problems related to DNS and DHCP. For example, entering the IPConfig /FlushDNS command purges the contents of the computer’s DNS resolver cache.

NSLookup

NSLookup is a great utility for diagnosing DNS name resolution problems. Just type the NSLookup command, and Windows will display the name and IP address of the device’s default DNS server. From there, you can type host names in an effort to see if the DNS server is able to resolve the specified host name.

Route

IP networks use routing tables to direct packets from one subnet to another. The Windows Route utility allows you to view the device’s routing tables. To do so, simply type Route Print.

The cool thing about the Route command is that it not only shows you the routing table, it lets you make changes. Commands such as Route Add, Route Delete, and Route Change allow you to make routing table modifications on an as needed basis. The changes that you make can be persistent or nonpersistent, depending on whether you use the -P switch.

PathPing

Earlier, I talked about the Ping utility and the Tracert utility, and the similarities between them. As you might have guessed, the PathPing tool is a utility that combines the best aspects of Tracert and Ping.

Entering the PathPing command followed by a host name initiates what looks like a somewhat standard Tracert process. Once this process completes however, the tool takes 300 seconds (five minutes) to gather statistics, and then reports latency and packet loss statistics that are more detailed than those provided by Ping or Tracert.

NetDiag

Perhaps the most useful of the network utilities that are built into Windows is NetDiag. The NetDiag command is designed to run a battery of tests on the computer in order to help the technician figure out why the computer is experiencing networking problems.

One of the things that I really like about this tool is that although there are a number of optional switches that you can use, you don’t have to use any of them unless you want to. Entering the NetDiag command by itself will cause all of the available tests to be run.

In some cases, NetDiag can not only identify problems, but can also fix those problems. Obviously, NetDiag cannot automatically correct every problem that it finds, but appending the /Fix parameter to the command will tell NetDiag to attempt to fix the problem automatically.

The Windows operating system is jam packed with command line utilities. Many of these utilities are left over from operating systems that were introduced decades ago. Even so, the utilities that I have discussed in this article are every bit as useful today as they were when they were first introduced.