Looking for a company's Web site but not sure where to start? You can, of course, use a search engine to track it down. But here's a much quicker technique that often pays off: simply use the company's name.
For instance, if you want to locate drivers for your Hewlett-Packard printer, type www.hewlett-packard.com or www.hp.com (hp is a common abbreviation for Hewlett-Packard) into your browser's address box and see if you make a match. Chances are, you will. You can also tack "au" onto the end of the address if you want to see if there's an Australian site for the company; the suffix "ca" will turn up Canadian companies; and so on. One pitfall: Many UK-based companies use the suffix co.uk instead of the expected com.uk. For example, to visit the online version of the British newspaper The Times, type www.thetimes.co.uk.
(By the way, all three of the addresses for Hewlett-Packard – www.hewlett-packard.com, www.hp.com and www.hp.com.au – work. Companies often have multiple addresses which point to the same site (or to subsidiaries), to ensure customers can find them easily.)
Smart addresses
Browsers have been getting progressively more intelligent about Web addresses. It used to be that you had to type the full address, including http:// at the beginning. Then they did away with the need for the http:// and you could get what you wanted without it.
Recent generations of browsers go one step further: you don't even need the www prefix and com suffix. For any Web address that takes the form www.sitename.com, all you need to do is type sitename in the address box and hit Ctrl-Enter. Unfortunately, this doesn't work for addresses ending in .com.au or .co.uk, for example. Nor will it work when you're looking for an FTP site or other non-Web Internet address. Then you'll have to provide the full address. The one exception is if you use Crazy Browser, a free browser which includes among its many attractive features the ability to customise the browser so it automatically adds non-.com suffixes such as .co.uk.
Auto-complete
Save yourself typing and let your browser do the work: both Netscape Communicator and Internet Explorer feature auto-completion of addresses. Each browser stores a list of recently visited Web sites. When you start to type an address, the browser will attempt to auto-complete the full address for you by looking up matching entries from sites you've visited in the past. If the auto-completed entry is incorrect, simply keep typing.
What's my IP?
Sometimes online you need to know your IP address. This is the address which identifies your computer on the Internet, and it's how information you request gets sent to you correctly, instead of ending up on someone else's computer. If you play online games with others and in some other circumstances, you'll need your IP address to create a direct connection between you and another Internet user. As your IP is usually dynamically assigned – that is, you get a different IP each time you connect to the Internet – how do you know what yours is?
It's easy to find out:
1. Click Start -> Run.
2. In the Run dialog box, type winipcfg and click OK.
A dialog box will be displayed, containing your IP address as well as other information.
Note: Microsoft doesn't include the Windows IP Configuration (winipcfg) tool with Windows 2000 or Windows XP. However, you can download a version for those operating systems directly from Microsoft
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