Just a thought: I gave it an IP address well clear of the other two machines which are '2' for the wireless Toshiba Notebook and '3' for the desk PC with wired LAN (both auto configured). Is this OK or should it be in sequence? (ie 4)
The only only thing that is important is that it be in the same network as your router and that it is an address that is not already in use by another machine. I.E. If your router's internal LAN address is 192.168.2.1 then you must assign an address that starts out with "192.168.2." and the last number must be at or between 2 and 254 and not already in use. A couple of things you might try are: 1: Exchange the cable with the one that is working on the other machine.
2: If your network adaptor driver software allows it, change the linkspeed/duplex setting from auto detect to half duplex then try it at full duplex.(some switches don't auto detect well). This is usually in the advanced adaptor settings.
3: If you have a crossover cable, you could set your pc to auto configure ip address then use it to connect your 2 hardwired machines and see if they can ping each other. They will automatically assign themselfs IP addresses in the 169.254 range.
If none of that works, you could try removing all the adaptors and the tcpip protocol completely. Then reinstall.
If that fails, I don't know what to tell you except to wipe and reinstall windows with the new adaptor already installed so the windows installer can see it. Something in the tcpip protocol stack could be so corrupted that you'll never fix it.
The other machines could not affect this one unless you had given out a duplicate address. But that would not explain you're not being able to be assigned an IP address automatically.
Let me know how it goes.
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