XP Home - Sony Laptop - Ethernet - Unable to connect to anything a

[Guest]

Have my bro-in-law's Sony VAIO laptop - it's about 4-5 years old. Has XP
Home on it. It was able to use the ethernet port a while back at his house.
Since then, he installed NetZero to use the laptop at his dial-up only
vacation spot. Now the vacation spot has wired broadband (Comcast) so we
tried switching back. Uninstalled NetZero. But now, we cannot connect
through the ethernet port.

We rebooted everything including power down of the cable modem, the router
and the laptop and brought everything back up in that order. We turned off
the XP firewall. No thrid party firewall is involved. I see that the
physical connection is there via the Netgear router (the router connect LED
is on). The router is set to allow in&out connections in the IP range from
###.###.0.1 to ###.###.0.120. We checked the "status" - the IP address is
0.0.0.0 with subnet mask of 0.0.0.0. The status shows 6 sent packets and 0
received. We tried to "repair" and XP reported that "the following steps of
the repair operation failed - renewing the IP address; refreshing of the DHCP
leases...". I tried manually to go to a command prompt and
/flushdns/release/renew. That resulted in a message saying the "system
cannot find the specified file." What file is it looking for? No clue.

So I don't know what's going on with this thing and I don't know what to try
next. Comcast states that up to the modem their system is fine. They give
you very little help beyond the modem, by simply doing what I've already
done. They said to take it to a repair shop.

Before I do that, any suggestions from this group would be appreciated.
Thanks.

 

[Robert L [MVP - Networking]]

This troubleshooting may help,

Acquiring network addressThe ipconfig command receives 0.0.0.0 IP address. 2. The NIC drops the connection occasionally. Possible solutions: 1. Upgrade the NIC drive. ...
http://www.chicagotech.net/Networking/acquiringnetwork.htm


Bob Lin, MS-MVP, MCSE & CNE
Networking, Internet, Routing, VPN Troubleshooting on http://www.ChicagoTech.net
How to Setup Windows, Network, VPN & Remote Access on http://www.HowToNetworking.com
Have my bro-in-law's Sony VAIO laptop - it's about 4-5 years old. Has XP
Home on it. It was able to use the ethernet port a while back at his house.
Since then, he installed NetZero to use the laptop at his dial-up only
vacation spot. Now the vacation spot has wired broadband (Comcast) so we
tried switching back. Uninstalled NetZero. But now, we cannot connect
through the ethernet port.

We rebooted everything including power down of the cable modem, the router
and the laptop and brought everything back up in that order. We turned off
the XP firewall. No thrid party firewall is involved. I see that the
physical connection is there via the Netgear router (the router connect LED
is on). The router is set to allow in&out connections in the IP range from
###.###.0.1 to ###.###.0.120. We checked the "status" - the IP address is
0.0.0.0 with subnet mask of 0.0.0.0. The status shows 6 sent packets and 0
received. We tried to "repair" and XP reported that "the following steps of
the repair operation failed - renewing the IP address; refreshing of the DHCP
leases...". I tried manually to go to a command prompt and
/flushdns/release/renew. That resulted in a message saying the "system
cannot find the specified file." What file is it looking for? No clue.

So I don't know what's going on with this thing and I don't know what to try
next. Comcast states that up to the modem their system is fine. They give
you very little help beyond the modem, by simply doing what I've already
done. They said to take it to a repair shop.

Before I do that, any suggestions from this group would be appreciated.
Thanks.

 

[Guest]

Robert - thanks for jumping in. I hate to be "whine-y" but let me point out
that first, the tray icon never indicates "Acquiring Network Address". I'm
watching for that carefully on startup. Secondly, this NIC isn't dropping
the connection "occassionally". To me it's much more serious than that - it
never achieves any connection at all. So this leads me to doubt that the
solution presented here fits. The one thing I can get from it is that maybe
the NIC drive(r) needs updating. That I can do as soon as I get a chance
tomorrow.

Thanks again - I try to post back with more results of testing with this
thing.

Hoib