Yesterday eve I had to add a laptop to my network which is using MAC address filtering. The laptop ran Windows Vista and I tried to locate its MAC address by using the good old ipconfig within a command prompt. This gave no results as apparently the network details only get listed once an actual network connection is made. As you probably have realised this is a catch-22 situation as without the MAC address registered on the router I was never going to make a network connection in the first place…!
Actually the weird thing is that the MAC address is normally on a sticker on the bottom of laptops, but in this case there was no such sticker.
Google as in most other cases provided a quick fix by pointing me in the right direction. There is a command specifically for this task named funnily enough: getmac.