Tap on the Start Button or press the Start logo key to open the Start Menu. Steps to find MAC address of your PC in Windows 10ġ. LAN connections, Ethernet ,802.11, wireless networks, Bluetooth IEEE 802.5, token ring, IEEE 802 networks, FDDI, ATM uses MAC addressing for communication purpose. MAC addresses of these virtual network adapters are of same length and format. Windows dial-up networking and VPN clients use virtual MAC addresses.

Windows also maintains one or more MAC addresses, which are not associated with hardware cards. This addressing depends on the company conventions. The remaining 3 bytes gives the physical address. This is known as the OUI or Organizationally Unique Identifier. This field helps to identify the company which manufactured the computer. The first three bytes represent the manufacturer identifier. The MAC addresses are 48 bits each which means each address is 6 bytes. Now giving a terse description about the data bits. MAC addresses are of two types, the universally administered addresses assigned by the manufacturer of the NIC and the locally administered addresses which are assigned to a computer device by the network administrator. That means it can accommodate 2^48 MAC addresses in all. Since, the address is registered and encoded by the manufacturer is it also known as hardware address. Every machine having a network interface card (NIC) installed in it is assgined a MAC Address.

Just like every house needs an address of its own to get identified by others, similarly every hardware machine also requires an identifier. MAC address or Media Access Control address is a unique identifying address that is designated to a computer over physical networks.

How to check mac address on windows 10