xp connection problem

[David Ananas]

Here is the problem:

I have a cable internet, router, and two PCs happily connecting with
the network and internet.

Enter my wife. She just moved in with me from another town, brought
her laptop with XP Pro with her. We connected the laptop to our
router. Opened up a browser, but no connection.

Control Panel > Network Connections, we see Local Area Connection with
the NIC for the laptop listed under Device Name. What is totally
puzzling to me is that under Status it says Connected! If you click
the LAN, under Activity group, it says Packets sent = 104 (or some
other number), Packets received = 0. Status = connected.

The laptop was previously used to connect to another router using
Verizon DSL.

I have deleted anything that has Verizon DSL, turned off any firewall,
ran Network setup wizard several times, restarted many times, to no
avail.

The ethernet cable used is just fine, tested it with the PC with no
problem.

So what's the problem here?

Thanks for any hints/solutions!

David

 

[Madhur Ahuja]

Here is the problem:

I have a cable internet, router, and two PCs happily connecting with
the network and internet.

Enter my wife. She just moved in with me from another town, brought
her laptop with XP Pro with her. We connected the laptop to our
router. Opened up a browser, but no connection.

First, can you ping the local network, instead of the Internet. try pinging
the other machine by both name and IP.

Control Panel > Network Connections, we see Local Area Connection with
the NIC for the laptop listed under Device Name. What is totally
puzzling to me is that under Status it says Connected! If you click
the LAN, under Activity group, it says Packets sent = 104 (or some
other number), Packets received = 0. Status = connected.

This shows only that the Ethernet card is connected to some media, it cannot
identify whether the connection is successful or not.

[snip]

 

[Steve Dawson]

Dave,

Several simple things to check first before you get really worried.

First do an "ipconfig /all" one one of the PCs that is happily connected to
the network. Make note of the ip address and gateway listed. Then run the
same command on your wife's laptop. If the ip address is not the same except
for the last group and or the gateway is not the same then that indicates
your problem.

Assuming that this is the problem then go to the properties of your wife's
laptop network connection. Under the properties of the TCP/IP ensure that
obtain IP address automatically is set and obtain DNS server automatically
is set.

If you make any changes there reboot your system and run the "ipconfig /all"
command on the laptop and your gateway and first three sections of the IP
address should match that of one of the happy PCs. Then try to ping
yahoo.com or some other site.

Let us know the results of that and we can take it further. It could be your
router being the DHCP point is only set to provide 2 addresses or something
else like that. My bets are on this however.

Steve Dawson
swd1051atsbcglobaldotnet

 

[David Ananas]

Assuming that this is the problem then go to the properties of your wife's

laptop network connection. Under the properties of the TCP/IP ensure that
obtain IP address automatically is set and obtain DNS server automatically
is set.

Thanks, Steve. Turns out that the laptop was set to obtain IP
automatically but DNS was not. Changed that and everything works fine
now.

David