If you understand the above drawbacks and the consequences that might come up and you still want to continue, the best way to completely disable the Ethernet settings is to disable participating network interface card or NIC altogether. When you disable the NIC, the configuration of the network interface card remains intact but the card stops working. The benefit of disabling the NIC is that when you re-enable the card, you get all the settings back to normal as they were configured before you disabled the network interface card. In other words, disabling the NIC allows you to have 0% overhead when you re-enable the card.
You can disable the NIC on your computer by following the steps given below:
- Log on to the Windows 8/Windows 8.1 computer with the administrator account.
- From the Start screen, click the Desktop tile.
- Once on the desktop window, press Windows + R keys on your keyboard simultaneously to initialize the Run command box.
- In the available field in the Run command box, type NCPA.CPL and press Enter.
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- On the opened Network Connections window, right-click the icon of the NIC that is used to connect to the local area network or the Internet.
- From the context menu that appears, click the Disable option.
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- In order to re-enable the NIC, follow the above procedure and click Enable when you are on step 6.
Note: If you only want to disconnect your computer from the Internet and want to remain connected with the other computers in the local area network, you can remove the IP address of the default gateway from the TCP/IP configuration box.

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