Will a Windows 10 PC connect happily to two different network routers?

debitcardmayhem

You can set the metric from netsh interface

CoastingHatbox

debitcardmayhem said:

You can set the metric from netsh interface

Yes I think I covered that with "then the OP will need to adjust the routing table" - still remains to be seen whether it is necessary.

CoastingHatbox

There's also a third option. If the OP doesn't mind all the devices connected to the old stand alone router having an Internet connection, replace it with one capable of acting as a wireless bridge. That will mean all the devices plugged into will be able to access the Internet via the bridge.

googler

Firstly, thank you all for the input

Secondly, please don't go to the trouble of breaking out gear to "check if XYZ will work" - it's really not that important to me, and it's not worth the effort. 

Why don't I connect everything to the Sky router? Essentially, because I don't want to. I actively want the Win10 machine to be away from an internet connection 99.9999% of the time, and unconnected to the other gear. I want it as a music replay system, on its own. Don't want it to interact with the other gear, don't want the music to stop if I have to unplug or fuss about elsewhere, or if something goes amiss with either the other PC or the Sky box.

Music gets onto the Win10 machine's internal drive by means of portable USB drives, copying it from the other PC. There's been a few occasions where I've stumbled across tracks where I wanted to get artwork for them which had been missed. I can transfer it via USB, same as the music files, when I next copy music to it, but if the Win10 machine will connect to the internut on a temporary basis, it would be shortcut to get a quick download.   

[Deleted User]

Yes you can make this work, the problem at the moment is that your BT hub is telling the music PC that it is the gateway to the internet so any attempts to send traffic outside your subnet range (eg internet) are most likely to go to the BT hub which isn't connected so they won't go anywhere.

You need to do a bit of manual config in your network connections to get this to work, the main one being removing the "default gateway" IP address from the ethernet adaptor on your BT network so the PC will send the traffic through the Wifi adapter as that will have a gateway to the internet. You also need to create a different subnet as per a previous post so that that the local network traffic to the squeeze box doesn't get sent to the Sky router when the Wifi is connected.

Steps:
1. Ensure the BT router is set to a different subnet to the Sky router, 192.168.1.x should be ok if the sky router is 192.168.0.x
2. Adjust the DHCP address range on the BT router to give you a spare IP address that you can use as a static address for the NIC on the music PC - given that you will only ever have 2 devices you can change the DHCP range to 2-100 say and then use 101-254 for the NIC on the music PC
3. Open network connection in control panel, right click on the ethernet connected to the Squeeze Box and open the TCP/IPv4 properties and click manual setting add a static IP address in the subnet range but outside of the DHCP for the BT router - eg 192.168.1.101 (101-254 ok) and set subnet mask to 255.255.255.0. Leave the default gateway as blank.
4. Set the DNS server gateway to manual and leave blank as well.
5. Switch the BT router, squeeze box and PC off, restart the BT router and allow time to come to life, then turn the SB/PC on.
6. When you now connect via wifi to Skybox, the PC will only be able to route internet traffic through the wifi NIC because this is the only one with a gateway specified.

Example: