How To Change MAC Address

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How To Change MAC Address

November 5th, 2008

Media Access Control(MAC) is a machine address that uniquely identifies each machine on the network. It uniquely defines the Network adapter/Ethernet card or what most people call the LAN card on a Local Area Network. MAC addresses are 12-digit hexadecimal numbers(48 bits in length), something like this 00:1C:EA:C2:63:25

It is quite unlikely that you will ever need to change your MAC/Physical address of your computer, but it’s always better to know.

Here is one scenario why you would want to change your MAC address. Suppose you installed a new Ethernet card and too lazy to tell your ISP about this. If you using a PPPoE dialer, you will get a ” 691Error”error saying

“Error 691: The computer you are dialling in to cannot establish a Dial-Up Networking connection. Check your password, and then try again”.

This can be fixed by applying the old MAC address to the new card.

MAC address can be spoofed using many softwares but here is a way to change it manually without installing any of those softwares.

Method 1

For Windows XP users – Goto Start > Control Panel > Network Connections and right click on the network connection (Local Area connection) and select “Properties”

For Windows Vista users - Goto Start > Network and Internet > Network and Sharing Center > Managed Network Connections.
Now in the “Properties” windows, Under the General tab click the “configure” button.
Select the “advanced” tab.
Now in the left list select “Network Address”

Now on he right side by default the value checked will be “Not present”. You can just enter the new values in the box and press “OK” to change the MAC address.

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Method 2

You can also change the MAC by making changes in the registry, but you will need Administrative privileges.

Backup the registry before trying this.

Click Start > Run, type “regedit” then press ENTER.

Then navigate to the following path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE – SYSTEM – CurrentControlSet – Control – Class – “{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}”, where you can find the settings for the network card. The contents of the string value called ‘NetworkAddress’ will be used to set the MAC address of the adapter when next it is enabled

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To see the changes that you have made, goto command prompt ( start>run>cmd) and type the command “ipconfig /all” at the command prompt and press enter. The physical Address there is your mac address.

If you want to make these changes using a software, you can use SMAC . since SMAC is shareware i Recommend Macshift.

Macshift is a free utility used to spoof your MAC address on Microsoft Windows.

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