How can you find out what your IP address is?
That depends on what (or which) IP address you want. If you are connected to some kind of a router within your network (that means you are 'sharing' your high speed internet connection with several computers in your home / apartment / where ever), or you are connecting to the Internet through a wireless connection in your home (etc.) then you probably have two IP addresses. That means we need to define some things, and then refine the question before we can get you an answer.
You high speed connection (cable modem or DSL modem) is assigned and IP address from your service provider. This is known as you 'external' IP address, and it is the IP address that the 'outside' world 'sees' when you are using the Internet. To find out what your external IP address is you simply start your web browser and then go to any one of a number of web sites that will tell you the IP address that they see. The easiest one for me to remember is www.whatismyip.com . That was the easy part, following is a screen print showing what my external IP address is!
However - if you have a home network (or small network of some sort) in which you share your Internet connection, printers, or maybe some data storage, then you likely have an 'internal' IP address as well. If you are on a simple network then you have allowed your router to use DHCP addressing to 'assign' your computer a unique IP address - probably in the 192.168.XXX.XXX range. To see what that IP address is you do the following steps:
Click on Start - Run
Type 'CMD' without the quotes and hit the enter key (For Vista users click on Start and in the 'start search' window type CMD and hit the enter key)
When the command window opens type "ipconfig /all" - again without the quotes - and hit the enter key
When you have found what you are looking for, just X out to close the window, or type 'exit' (without the quotes) and hit the enter key to close the command session.
In the response that comes back to the screen you will see all sorts of information, but, some of it will identify your Ethernet Adapter (network card) and will show you your IP address on the internal network. In the picture below you will see my information:
In this example you see the command I ran at the top (ipconfig /all), that my Ethernet Adapter Wireless Network Connection is disabled (I'm on a laptop so the wireless card is present but turned off right now) showing that the 'media disconnected' message is present. Next you see the Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection is active, that the network card is a Marvell Yukon, the physical address (also known as a MAC address) which is always listed in hexadecimal notation. Further down you see my Internal IP address is 192.168.0.6, and finally you see when I started my computer today (Lease Obtained 2/15/08 at 06:35:54) and when the lease expires (good for 24 hours).
So - in this example - my external IP address is 24.123.169.42 - and my internal IP address is 192.168.0.6.
Easy eh? <<GG>>