[quote]DHCP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Ho ... n_ProtocolWe are concerned with static IP's only for two reasons usually.
First, if your ISP issues your connection an external static IP address, that IP never changes, it's unique to your internet connection. Many ISP's issue dynamic IP's that change periodically, this only affects your gaming if you are running a full time server and people try to connect to the same IP address they used last time you hosted a game, because the IP may now be different under dynamic IP's sent from your ISP.
More than likely you aren't serving games and that is not the issue.
Your router will allocate IP's under DHCP if that function is turned on. When you boot into windows, the router issues your connected PC's an IP address from the available or configured range under DHCP.
If you turn DHCP off, you need to manually set a static IP for each PC, or LAN device in order to connect to the router, because the router and windows no longer automatically configures an IP address for your PC's under DHCP.
I prefer to set a small range of available static IP's for my PC's in my router configuration, then I manually set each PC to an unique IP address within that small range. The subnet for all the IP's needs to be set correctly as well.
By setting a static IP, you can open ports on the router that are configured to that static IP. If you open a port for a game on a DHCP controlled network, there's a chance that the next time you play the game, the IP set in the router for the open gaming port will be different from the IP address DHCP just assigned to your PC the last time it booted up under DHCP.
I have 3 PC's networked..... 2 gamers and a game server. Router DHCP is off and all PC's have a static IP set.
I could rave on and make lots of mistakes telling you how to set up static IP's, but it depends on your router for part of the procedure.
The windows part, where you set a static IP address for your gaming machine is fairly straightforward.
You will need:
1. knowledge of the Static IP range set in your router (so you can allocate a correct IP to your PC within that range)
2. Your router's IP address (gateway)
3.