How to change your DNS Server to Cloudflare and Google’s and more tips and tricks for windows users!

Here is a guide for how to check your DNS settings and configurations for sites you own or want to visit. Some of these tips are for beginners but there are plenty of new things even for advanced users to learn!

The terminal/command prompt commands I will be using in the post are only relevant to windows users… If you have a Mac or Linux they will not work…

1) How to open command prompt and some cool commands

Win + R -> type CMD -> click Ok or press Enter

Command choices:

ipconfig — generic stats about your network adapters and IP addresses

ipconfig /all — more detailed view

getmac — returns the MAC address of all the devices on your computer

whois — want to see who owns a website, when it expires and who the domain registrar is? On windows, this doesn’t come built into the operation system but it is a package which you can add do do the check. You can add the path location to your environment variables which allows you to run it in any directory via CMD.

setx whois “C:\enter your directory here”

setx whois “C:\Program Files\whois”

where whois is the folder containing the EXE

Alternatively, you can perform a search for whois in your favorite search engine and there are 3rd party websites which provide a similar service. I prefer using the windows package as it’s faster and there are no ads or bloatware unlike on those websites.

Exercise Caution with these ones:

ipconfig /release — releases your DHCP leased IP address… you will lose internet after running this

ipconfig /renew — gets you a new IP address (run this immediately after the release command finishes)

4) Find an IP address from a domain name:

Open CMD and write: ping example.com

That command also shows you server response time and packet loss…This is a great tool to check and verify if you can access a website…