Windows - Connect To OpenVPN Server

Pre-requisites

1. Windows .net framework 4

Instructions

Install openvpn from here (googling openvpn client download will quite often get you a different program which uses username/passwords instead).
Copy your configuration files (ca.crt client.conf etc) to a directory you will remember. For this example we will use
C:/data/vpn_files
Change the paths in the
client.conf
file to the location directory of your config files (previous step). These paths need to be in double quotes and escape it like so:
"C:\\path\\to\\vpn\\files\\ca.crt"
Move the
client.conf
file to
C:\Program Files\OpenVPN\config
Rename the
client.conf
file to be
client.ovpn
.
It is really useful if you configure windows to not hide known file extensions, from the control panel's "folder options".
Right-click the OpenVPN GUI icon in the system tray (bottom right of screen) and click connect. If you have multiple .ovpn files you will have a menu to select which connection to connect to.
Windows 7 need to run the OpenVPN GUI application as administrator in order for the updating of routes not not fail. [ reference ].
Go here and you should see the IP of your server at the top if everything went successfully.

Troubleshooting

• Try manually setting your DNS to 8.8.8.8 (Google's DNS server)
• Make sure windows shows your file extensions and check your ovpn file at
  C:\Program Files\OpenVPN\config
• Make sure your .ovpn file looks similar to the one in
  C:/Program Files/OpenVPN/sample-config/client.ovpn
  .