Michael Callahan: Hi, this is Mike Callahan, Dr. File Finder and welcome back to our butterscotch.com ten part series on understanding your router. On this segment, we are going to look at using DHCP, which stands for dynamic host configuration protocol. It's a complicated way of saying that you have the router assign IP addresses to computers and devices on your network instead of signing them yourselves. Now back here in the router configuration that we've logged into last time, you see here is the router address. There are some basic configuration options. We're under setup, basic setup. Even if you have a different brand of router, you're going to have the same basic categories in your router configuration. So you see here, I have it set for automatic configuration DHCP. Other options that are selectable are static IP, PPTP and others.

But in this introductory series, we are not going to get into those. You can change your router's name; you can name your router -- whatever you prefer. Here, you see the local IP address is 192.168.1.1. In this instance, the local IP address is referring to the IP address of the router. Now, DHCP server, enable or disable, in this case you want to enable it. The starting IP address is 192.168.1 and here it says a 100. Now you can change this. These numbers are permanent, you can't change those, but you can change what number it starts at; we leave it at 100.

Then you can say maximum number of DHCP users. It set at 50; you can change it to 10, you can change it to a 100, you can't go above a 100, you change it to 29 whatever you like, whatever you think will meet the needs that you have for assigning IP addresses. So when you plug-in into the laptop, the router automatically assigns it a new address starting from here and not duplicating one that's already in use. These other things pertained to static IP addresses, you want to make sure that your time zone is correct, you automatically adjust for daylight saving times, then click save settings.

Now, computers, laptops, iPhones, BlackBerrys, and other things that are added to your network will automatically get the IP address that they need. Keep in mind that this is a ten part series; be sure to look for the other episodes.