One way to assure that is by keeping your DSL modem connected to your DSL provider. Additionally, however, your computer needs to keep "talking." Typically, people solve this problem by pinging some web site regularly. That works. Unfortunately, that also abuses the resources of that web site.

KeepMyIP takes a different approach. Instead of pinging some third party, it sends a random DNS query to your ISP at random intervals ranging from 1 second to 10 minutes, with an average of around 5 minutes. This tells your ISP that your computer is currently active on the Internet. It does so very fast without involving any unrelated Internet sites. It also does it without wasting your computer memory and CPU cycles.

KeepMyIP is written in assembly language, so it is very small and lightning fast. In between the queries it puts itself to sleep so it does not interfere with whatever your computer is doing. It runs silently in the background without ever popping any windows. If, for some reason, you need to send out queries more often than every five minutes, or so, you can run KeepMyIP more than once. Two copies will poll your ISP twice as often, three copies three times as often, etc. Normally, however, KeepMyIP starts one copy of itself as soon as your Windows boots up and keeps running until you shut down the system.

Of course, if you run an Internet server, you should avoid shutting down your system, except for very brief periods of time (minutes). Otherwise, your servers are not running and neither is KeepMyIP, so your IP address may change. But if you keep your system up and running, you can keep your IP for a very long time.

Please remember that Keep My IP does not pop up any windows. When it runs, it runs. Do not keep double-clicking on its icon because it appears like nothing is happening. If you want to verify that it is running, press ctl-alt-del and click on the Processes tab. You should see KeepMyIP.exe in the list. Also, if for some reason you want to stop it from running temporarily, select it in the above list and click on End Process. If you need to stop it permanently, just uninstall it.

Simply double-click on setup.exe and Keep My IP will be installed on your system. It will start running immediately and continue to run until you reboot your system. However, as soon as you reboot the system, Keep My IP will start running again.

If you no longer need it (for example if you get a static IP address), just uninstall it. You can always reinstall it if you need it again.