Hey, i'm new here, but i really need help with something, and there seems to be a lot of people here that know stuff like this a lot better than i do.

anyway, i have this normal, medium tower like, pc from fujitsu siemens (silverline) with windows xp professional and have used windows update to keep it up to date. the computer is a pentium 4 1.4 ghz and has 256 MB RAM. So i've had this for like two years now, and it's always worked just fine. about two weeks ago though, i bought myself a laptop which i needed for school, and after that i bought a NETGEAR wireless router (wit 4 normal ports too) so i could connect both the normal computer and the laptop to the internet at the same time. i had to return the first router since it didn't work, but the second one has worked just fine, at least with my laptop. the other computer just complains that there is not network cable attached, even when there is one. i have tried everything i can think of, i changed the network card, i disconnected the router and connected the computer directly to the LAN port in the wall, i've checked all the settings (i think) but nothing seems to work. the network card is detected and installed just fine, so that doesn't seem to be the problem, and i've tried two different ones.

the weird thing is that the computer could access the internet until i returned the old router, after that it hasn't been able to do anything with networking at all. any ideas? if anyone need even more information, please ask, i really need the computer back online...

thanks a lot to anyone who takes the time to think about this for a bit.

edit: i should add that the laptop has no problems whatsoever. it works just fine both connecting it with a cable to the router or with a wireless pc-card, so the router doesn't seem to be the problem.

do you have youre original network card back in the machine? sometimes ISPs
connect directly to your modem by MAC address or if they have problems
your NIC..
you may have problems with your layout.. double check to make sure that
your new goodies play nice with your old ones and that you are using the
right type of cables. really scrutinise the connections and make sure the
color patterns match on each end of them. make sure the new components
are auto sencing for 10/100mbps
dont forget you may have to change your default router in your network
settings if youve swapped out components..

when in doubt, diagram it out.. no one will ever chastise you for walking yourself
through on paper.

If youre still stuck you can always hurt a live technitians head from your ISP as well.

thanks a lot for the info, i'll check some things again, but i don't think that the problem is anything like that... my ISP doesn't seem to care about MAC or anything like that, since i've had two different computers connected directly to the network socket in the wall (standard TP cable socket, LAN connection). i did not have a router before, so that shouldn't be the problem either. i removed the old network card, and checked under the system configuration that it was uninstalled. i've come to the conclusion that the problem "should" be within the computer somehow (OS, network card...?) but have no idea what to do about it, since i've pretty much depleted my "well of knowledge" in this particular area. it was a pretty shallow well though...

i realized that this forum might not have been the right one, since i discovered a while ago that there was a networking forum also, but since it might be a problem withing windows (what do i know?) feel free to come with any suggestions you might have. thanks!

you might want to try to set up the connection manually..

start>settings>controlpanel>network&dialupsettings

just follow the steps for a new connection and dont forget to disable the old one.
(it should still exist, if not this was probably your problem.)

that doesn't work either, the problem doesn't seem to be as "simple" as that. i think i've tried pretty much all the "normal" things you would do, but nothing changes at all.

You said previously that your computer plugged into a socket in the wall. Presumabably then you have dedicated cabling and at the other end you have changed a device to your current router. Are you absolutely sure that the connection is now good to that socket? I.E. since you changed the router have you used another PC in that plug. It's possible that the cable at the other end is now the wrong kind or the connection is bad or.???

No problem. Regardless of the OS, this is more of a networking issue than anything else, so I've moved it to the Networking forum.

In terms of the problem:

1. When you connect the Ethernet cable from the 'puter to the router, do the link/activity indicator lights on the both the router and the network card light up? If not, try yet another Ethernet cable.

2. If Device Manager indicates that the NIC is working properly, open a DOS box, type the following command, and post the info that the command displays:

ifconfig /all

3. Manually assign your IP address, subnet mask, gateway IP, etc. to the card, run these commands, and post the results:

ping 127.0.0.1
ping localhost
ping the IP address you assigned to the NIC

i've tried two different cables, and i'm sure both of them work, since my laptop can connect to the router, but the network card in the "normal" computer just won't light up, and in the device manager, it says that the device is working properly. if i connect the computer to the router, it doesn't even indicate that there is a computer connected to the port, but the router seems to work just fine too, since the laptop runs over the router, both with cable and wireless.

i could still try the ipconfig thing, but last time i did that i didn't notice anything special... i'll have to get back to you on that one though.

an option i thought of trying is changing the pci slot, i'll try that later, although i don't think will have any effect what so ever.

also, someone asked about the type of connection (since i just had a LAN port in the wall), it's just like that, a LAN connection, no modems or anything. it works for pretty much any computer (with the right hard- and software settings) that i've connected to it before, so i don't really see any possibility of that being the problem either.

this is really getting annoying, i've never had anything like this happen to me before, but i hope to fix it someday... maybe a fresh install of windows xp would help, but i have too much "important" stuff on there right now, and only a cd-burner.... (plus no way to move files over the network... :-| )

again, thanks a lot to all of you who are trying to help me, i really appreciate all your thoughts on the subject!

YES! It took some work, and I'm not entirely sure what made it work, but I am now writing this from my regular computer, and not my laptop!

I guess I should tell you what I did, since a couple of you really did try to help me out: First of, I switched PCI slot for the network card, but I didn't have a free slot, so I had to take out the modem (which i don't use), but that somehow made the computer not want to start because of a system failure or something like that. So I put the modem back in and used one slot that I didn't really want to use, since it was a really tight fit with the thicker graphics card right above it. Also this slot made it kind of hard do get the cable out/in since the connector for the monitor kind of blocked the possibility to push the little "pin" on the network cable... Anyway, I put the network card in that slot, and it started to blink when I put the cable in (which it did when the system failure occured too, which was why I tried another PCI slot as well). Now everything seemed to work, but I could still not access the internet. I plugged the cable from the computer to the router instead, and somehow, that did it. Possibly it could have worked without too, since it sometimes seems to take a while for the computer to realize it's on the internet, but anyway, it works now!

Sounds pretty simple, but infact the "trial and error" procedure used to discover this, took me a couple of hours (with moving the computer, connecting everything, moving cards and so on...), and I kind of missed the second half of the champions league game between Celtic and Barcelona (but I did see all the interesting stuff), but it was worth it!

Again, thanks a lot for trying to help me! Who knows, someday some other guy or girl might need this info...

noticing this many-a-time with CISCO hardware. if you are connected to a network where there is a provider for the service for the entire community and all you do is plug into a jack... what seems to have happened is that you've maxed out the amount of registered MAC addresses to that port. A very common oversight for the average tech support guru. most level one techs (obviously the one you had on the phone) wont even know to look that far. the setting is a very common security setting for most switches in large networks....

the next time you get them on the phone see if they cant escalate the issue so that someone with the admin privileges to whatever switch you are plugged into can "shutdown" the port that you are connected to and "no shut" it back up. works like a charm...