If you are a systems administrator in a Windows 7, Vista and XP mixed environment, or may be just a normal home, SOHO user, you might have noticed that if you ping a Windows 7 machine from a Windows seven machine, you get your ping reply back in IP version 6 (which looks much more cryptic than IP version 4). We are all very use to of getting a normal ping response displayed to us in numeric format, rather than the long cryptic alphanumeric reply. In this article we will show you how you can change your default ping reply in Windows Seven to be IP version 4 and at the end of this article we have a bonus tip which tells you how you can get IP V4 ping replies without changing anything on your machine

Before we start, I wanted to mention quickly that you can only get a IP Version 6 reply back from a machine if the originating machine and destination machine has Internet Protocol version 6 installed. If either of the machines do not have IP version 6 installed, the ping reply you will get back will be in IP version 4. In order to make your default ping reply switch to IP V4, you need to disable IP V6 in your network properties, here is how to do it:

Step1: Click on Start -> Control Panel -> Network and Internet. If you don't see Network and Internet, make sure your "view" is set to "category"

Step2: Click on View Network Status and Tasks

Step3: Click on Local Area Connection

Step4: Click on Properties

Step5: Uncheck Internet Protocol version 6 and hit OK. No restart is necessary

Step6: Try pinging another Windows 7 machine now and your default reply will be in IP Version 4.

Now that you have seen how to change the default to IP V4, here is a cool trick to getting replies back in IP V4 without changing any network properties! If you did a Ping command in the format:

Ping <hostname or machinename> -4

You will get a ping reply back in version 4. Similarly, issuing the following command will provide a reply back in IP version 6

Ping <hostname or machinename< -6

IP version 6 was introduced to deal with the fact that the net is running out of version 4 IP addresses, however there is no real need for IP V6 to be your default yet and an average user can easily live without it being on their machine