A client reported a windows 8.1 machine – a laptop which appeared to be struggling to sustain an internet connection either as a wired or wireless connection. Changing the unit from a static to a dhcp address for both options showed up something interesting when an ipconfig command was run in a elevated dos session.
In addition to the gateway that I was expecting from the dhcp allocation – another gateway was listed as 0.0.0.0
Now as must people will know – if they have ever had to change the ip v4 address of a machine – there is only one place to enter the gateway and there can be only one !! So where is this ghostly gateway coming from. My guess was that it had been added (possibly by an application being installed that needed a gateway set but the laptop may not have received an address in time) and it defaulted to a value of 0.0.0.0
Before you proceed – you should ensure that no other applications are relying on that gateway (not sure if I can think of a common use case) !!
Using an ELEVATED dos session – the command to remove this route is
route delete 0.0.0.0
In this case the internet connection immediately sprang into action and was demonstrably faster that before – due to what was possibly contention between the two values for gateway.