I have four PCs on a router. Two are hard wired one is wireless, and the last use my electrical wires for an ethernet connection

a few times each month on one of the PC s I will get a windows error that there is an address conflict with another PC on my network.

What is the cause of this and how do I prevent it ?


Thanks

tom

Do you have your wireless connection secure. It maybe a neighbor trying to access your LAN, probably by accident. That would be a simple explanation. Next time it happens check your router to see who is on your LAN.
You could also set your computers with a static (assigned) IP address and disable DHCP in the router.
Check your wireless configuration for now.

Most commonly address conflicts are caused by hibernating or standby. The sleeping computer retains the IP address in it's memory - but isn't actually connected to the network.

So the network thinks that it's free and assigns it to another computer.

Then you boot up the sleeping computer and it tries to use that address again.

The immediate fix is to open a command prompt (Start...Run...and type in "cmd.exe" (without the quotes) and press Enter).

Then type in "ipconfig /release" (without the quotes) and press Enter
Then type in "ipconfig /renew" (without the quotes) and press Enter
And that should fix the conflict.

The long term solution is to give the sleeping computer a fixed IP address and reserve that address for it in the router.