Problem with the internet on my laptop... help!

[plugmein]

Okay, I'm not a computer genius so I don't know all of the little details like most of you seem to, but I'm fairly fluent in average computer knowledge and I'll do my best to explain the problem without completely confusing you.

So, my Gateway laptop has Windows XP on it, and up until recently I could plug any old cable from a modem into it and it would work fine. Well, it randomly stopped working in my house. It gets the signal, the little puters pop up in the toolbar, but it only sends packets, it doesn't recieve any, and I can't get on internet explorer or anything. It's basically like it's not connected.

Well, after it stopped working at my house I took it over to a friend's and it worked with his cable cord. I left it there for a while (it was off, nobody touched it). I went back and plugged it in and it did the same thing there! It stopped working in the same manner as it had at my house.

So I brought it home and I'm back to it not working. I have it sitting next to me , plugged in, and I've been trying to fix it all day. I've done most of the typical stuff that my knowledgeable friends said I should, but nothing seems wrong to them and they can't figure it out.

In my house we have three computers hooked up to the internet (including my laptop that isn't working). We have a cable modem through Comcast Cable. We have a hub that says "NETGEAR Ethernet Hub EN 104" on it and all of the computers are connected to that. The other two have kept working fine.

Even if I take the cable directly from this computer, which is obviously working, and plug it into my laptop it won't work.

P.S. I have a feeling it might have something to do with my primary DNS suffix or my computer name or something. When I do ipconfig it doesn't give a "Connection-specific DNS suffix" or a "Default Gateway."

I'm not sure what that means, but it's just something I noticed.

[Steven.Bentley]

Welcome

Try this - on the affected machine go into start>run and type in cmd and then type ipconfig /all into the DOS box which appears. See whether you have an IP address, and also whether DNS servers are specified