Brightrev

I had someone stop by the site recently looking for information on how to find their network card's MAC address, also known as a physical or hardware address. I realized that it's actually tough to find the MAC address in Windows Vista, so I decided to write an article to show how to find the MAC address in Vista, Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.4.

In all three operating systems, it's easiest to get the MAC address via the command line. In Windows, the command is ipconfig /all, while Mac OS X users would type ifconfig into the Terminal application.

Windows XP

Finding your MAC address in Windows XP is easy with the command prompt. Click Start->Run and then type cmd and press enter. When you see the CMD window, type ipconfig /all. You may see a few Physical address entries here, but the one you're looking for will include an IP address, while the other ones probably won't.

To find your MAC address in the Windows XP GUI, open Control Panel by clicking Start->Control Panel

Double-click the Network Connections icon, then right-click your network connection and click Status. Your network connection is usually named Local Area Connection if you're connected to a wired network.

Click the Support tab and then the Details... button and a dialog will show your network connection's MAC address, along with other relevant connection information.

Hint: If you press CTRL-C with the details window open, Windows will copy your network information to the clipboard and you can paste it into any application.