**The instructions in this post are for your home computer(s) only. If your computer is owned by a business or is managed by a Systems Administrator or I.T. department, then I do NOT recommend changing your DNS settings on your computer. Please consult your Systems Administrator if you have any questions about this.

where one of my customers was having DNS problems with their internet service provider (ISP). In that post I talked about re-routing their network to talk to Google Public DNS instead of the ISP's DNS servers, as well as the reason as to why you would actually want to do this. The result of making this change to Google DNS is that the customer's internet problems were fixed allowing them to access their websites again, as well as improving their internet surfing speed. Now, without getting too technical, this change made it appear to the customer that the internet bandwidth which they pay for artificially increased without their bill increasing. Today, I am going to show you how to change your DNS network settings on your computer to bypass your ISP's DNS to Google's free public DNS service on your Windows 7 or Windows 8 computer. Lets get started!

  1. Right-click on the network icon next to the clock on your computer and choose "Open Network And Sharing Center".
  2. In the left pane, click on "Change Adapter Settings".
  3. The Network Connections window appears onscreen. Click on the network connection that you want to change the settings on to highlight it.

** If you computer is physically connected to your network with an Ethernet cable, then choose the Wired Ethernet Connection. If your computer is connected to your network using a Wireless connection, then choose the wireless network connection.
4. Right-click the network connection and choose "Properties".
5. On the Networking Tab, scroll to the bottom and click on the "Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4)" in the list, then click on the "Properties" button.
6. A new window appears. Leave the "Obtain an IP address automatically" bullet point selected, but change the second bullet to "Use the following DNS server addresses". 
7. In the Preferred DNS server entry, type "8.8.8.8" (without quotes). In the Alternate DNS server entry, type "8.8.4.4".
8. Click OK to save, then click OK on the network connection property window.

Need a visual aid for configuring your DNS settings? Watch this videoA while back, I talked about an issue

Done! Your computer is now set to utilize Google Public DNS. If you ever want to go back to using your default ISP DNS settings, simply repeat the process above but in step 6, change the bullet option back to "Obtain DNS server addresses automatically". As always, send me your comments or suggestions about my blog posts and YouTube videos to [email protected]!

-Joe