Today I have prepared a very basic but nevertheless useful tutorial for you all. Well It might not be useful everybody but since more and more network administrators enjoy deploying additional security policies in the segment they are responsible for one of the options they like is to apply MAC address filtering. If you are not completely familiar what the MAC address is I would recommend to spent some time to read this article What is MAC address.

Now it is time to begin with the step by step instructions. There are many different way that you can get to the LAN card properties but I have chosen for you the most straight forward approach. The first point is to get to the Network Connections screen. You can get there basically in few ways also.
Since i have on my desktop My Network Places icon I simply right click on it and go to Properties. Another way yo get to Network connections is from the Control Panel in Windows XP but in my personal opinion it takes too much clicks that way.

OK once you are there you have to choose the Network Connection that uses the NIC (Network Interface Card) that we need the MAC address changed. To get the tutorial more visual I have used Windows XP PC with only one LAN card and only one Network connection : the Local Area Connection.

A new window will pop up and will focus to the the general tab. Actually that is all that we need from this window. The first thing you see there is the Connect using section. In the field that you get the NIC name and a button Configure. Click on it.

Another window will pop up (Windows XP likes that a lot, isn't it?). I would like to note that again we can get to the NIC (Network Interface Card) properties following some other directions. For example you can get there from the Device Manager. However it doesn't really matter how we got there but what we are going to do once we are. First we need to go to the Advanced tab. In the Properties box you will see quite a few different options that you can configure on your LAN card. Well the variety of options depends on the drives that you have installed but that is another story. In my case I use Intel network card so the property that will enable me to change the MAC address is Locally Administrated Address.

Note: With using different NICs and drives this property name may vary. It can be: Hardware Address, MAC address, Network Address and so on. If you have difficulties finding the property please feel free to contact us for guides. You can either use the Request a Tutorial Form or our Forum

The default value of the Locally Administrated Address is Not Present. You move the radio button to Value state and in the text box type the MAC address that you need. Be careful to not put and hyphens, dots or colons. Click OK button and you are done.