Network connection problems - detects LAN but no gateway is established

[piggeh]

I built a PC a few years ago and recently sold it to a friend of the family. When I did so, I done a clean install of XP, installed SP3, and set up the wireless card so wireless worked fine for networking etc. I had no problems with the network side (wired and wireless) whilst I had it.

PC was installed at their gaff. They don't have wireless and they said plugging the wire in didnt work. So, I went round, uninstalled the wireless card (just in case of any conflicts), installed the (nvidia) drivers for the built-in Ethernet port on the motherboard. Now, it picks up the network port, and detects when I plug in the wire. It then spends two minutes or so trying to acquire a network address, before eventually finding one. However, the internet doesn't work, and when I type in ipconfig it doesnt show any setting for the gateway address (which is the router address I believe). Also, when I plug in the network cable and it's trying to get an address, it sends very little data, basically 2 bytes at any time.

Any suggestions on how to fix? Motherboard is a Gigabyte K8N S939 SLI if that helps.

[Viper81]

You could try the Winsock fix tool (google should point you the right way). I've used it a few times on machines that had issues connecting to networks. It basically runs a few 'netsh' commands and resets a bunch of registry entries related to the TCP/IP stack.
Otherwise, just do it the quick way and stick in a static address on the PC

[piggeh]

Can I choose any IP address, and I'd imagine these go in the internet options part in Internet Explorer/Control Panel? Havent had to do it before, so any hints on that would be appreciated (will google it tomorrow - I cant get to the machine until Saturday again so got two days to figure some solutions out)

Will deffo give winsock fix a go though.

[GvForces]

maybe you should try putting the ip adressess manually if the dhe dhcp server on the router isn't working as it should

[peterb]

You can either set up an IP address manually (something like 192.168.1.5 with a netmask of 255.255.255.0) and make sure the router has an IP address in the same range (say 192.168.1.1) but it would be better to go into the router and set up the DHCP server so that it hands out the IP address and all the details to the host computer. You will laso need to make sure the router is acting as a DNS relay so the host computer can resolve dns addresses.

[piggeh]

DHCP is enabled on the router - I'd imagine it works correctly as it successfully allocates an IP to the laptop, so the problem looks to be on the PC side rather than router settings.

[Jay]

I would do as they said above allocate it an IP address and see if that fixes it.

[joz12345]

try assigning an ip adress out of range of the DHCP pool, maybe 192.168.1.150 with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0
My router doesnt like it if you assign an IP adress it has control of
BTW, if you havent figured out how to change these settings yet, open network connections, right click LAN and press properties, then click ipv4, properties, and a screen where you can change ip addresses will come up