MacTricksAndTips.com

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We are continuing with the Noob2Pro series. Today’s post will focus on a variety of tips and tricks to increase your skills with the network portion of your Mac system. Some tips will include making sure you get the best up time, the fast speed available and other tips and tricks. At this point I assume you know how to work your network (you just have to plug it in) so I am going to skip over some of the basics. All these tips will use the System Preferences pane.

The first step is to open System Preferences > Network. This is where all of the tips will take place. The first tips I would like to point out is the ability to set different network options depending on your location. If you notice at the top of the system preferences pane there is a drop down list. Here you can add and remove locations (using the Edit Locations options). If you use a laptop at home and at work, you can set up various different rules. Any changes you make will only effect the locations you have selected. This is very useful if you need to have different settings at different places.

The next two tips will allow you to make sure your network is more reliable. In the Network preference pane select Advance, in the new window select the TCP/IP tab. This screen shows how your Mac connects to the network. Under Configure IPv4 I would recommend you select “Using DHCP with manual address”, in the address box add an address that isn’t used. I prefer this option as you can select your own address, but if there is a conflict (such as a game console joining the network) you will still be able to connect. This gives you the most reliability.

The second tip in the “Advance” settings it the DNS options. Under the DNS tab add the following IP addresses to the list (click on the plus button to add an IP address). The IP’s are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220. These are the IP addresses for the OpenDNS server and allows a fall back if your ISP servers ever fail.

These three tips will allows you to use your network in the most efficient way. You can play around with the size of the packets travelling over your network, you can also set up proxies, but for the majority of people you really don’t need to do any of that. If you personally have an uber cool tip or trick you would like to share, please leave a comment.