How in the Tech

Manage Multiple Network Profiles in Windows

By Adam Myers ⋅ November 11, 2008 ⋅ Tags: Networking

Windows is missing a pretty important feature, at least in my day to day computing experience. To be honest, it is likely missing a number of key features but today I’m only talking about network profiles. As laptop sales begin to outpace the traditional desktop, we all will become annoyed when we have to access different networks on our laptop – in my case, at home and at the office. Network profiles would allow the user to change and save the network settings for their most common hook-ups which, in turn, allows one to access the network resources with little difficulty. I believe Microsoft is heading in this direction; Vista will ask you to identify any new network introduced to it – either as Public or Private. The problem with this is it’s offerings are extremely limited as it only controls the way computers on that network interact with one another.

NetSetMan, or Network Settings Manager, is a freeware utility for all the recent versions of Windows that provides different network profiles accessible with a flick of the mouse. Each profile is broken down into 3 sections: IP, DNS, and Additional. IP and DNS should be pretty familiar to many of us, and I could even say they aren’t truly necessary since this type of information will be served out over DHCP – which almost all networks provide. Regardless, it’s there if you need it.

The functionality I truly desire is located under the Additional section. From here you are able to control things such as the computer name, the domain it belongs to, or even the workgroup membership. Furthermore, and the feature that seals the deal, the default network printer and network drives can be defined and applied on a whim. You can even go as far as creating and defining a script (.bat, .vbs, .js) that can be executed.

NetSetMan solves a simple problem and does it well.