unable to connect to internet

[boherb]

I have a home network with an ATT router and maybe 10 devices on it. One device, a dell latitude laptop running Windows XP is the issue here. This PC has always connected to the wireless network just fine, but today will not. I have worked with ATT, no help at all, but have gathered the following.

• my laptop IP address is 169.254.xxx.xx. This IP address does not change when I reboot, and does not change when I do ipconfig/releanse, or renew, or when I do a dnsflush. (I dont know what these are, the ATT guys had me do them).
• the router is not seeing this IP address. It assignes 192. ip addrsses to all other devices. I am almost sure that used to be the ip range for this laptop as well.

To a layperson, it seems that the router cannot assign an ip to this laptop, and does not recognize the one it has.

• when I open network connections, it says signal strength excellent, but also "limited or no connectivity". The message also says "This problem occurred because the network did not assign a network address to the computer".

• Yesterday, I did a ccleaner where I deleted a couple of programs (an ATT toolbar, a printer software thing, and I think that is it, but I must have done something to cause this laptop to suddenly not connect after 9 months of flawless performance.

• I did a system restore to take me to a state before I did the ccleaner, but I dont think that helps with removed programs (if that is even the issue). I have also looked in my recycle hoping to find something there to reinstall, but nothing.

I am sorry if this is poorly worded. I am not a technical person, and am at a loss. Att said to take it to Office Depot. I am hoping someone here might have better advice, and can get me out of a mess I am sure I created.

Thank you for any responses.

[JorgeM]

You are on track with your analysis. The 169.254.x.x address is an APIPA address. Without getting into the technical details, a Windows system will self assign itself an ip in this range when it is unable to negotiate an address with your router.

You could try applying a static ip address to see if that works for the time being. Here is a video tutorial I have on YouTube regarding TCP/IP configuration on XP. The concept is the same for other Win versions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_drzbZcJSc

You may be able to resolve this by uninstalling the network adapter in device manager and letting windows rescan and reinstall it. This procedure fixes flaky issue.

[vbalag]

1. try with static ip first and c if it works,
2. put the lan into auto ip mode and then you can reset the ip of the pc with
   netsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt command in cmd prompt with admin rights. unplug and plug in the lan cable from the pc

Hope this helps