I have an old (~7 years old) XP laptop, a Toshiba Tecra, that I need to revive after sitting unused for several years, to take on a trip that I am about to undertake. [See related post about Honda for sale]

I cannot get it to connect to the internet, either by Ethernet or by wireless.

I have my choice of two wireless routers in my house, and plenty of other devices (iPhones, netbooks, laptops, Android phones, iPads, etc.) connect seamlessly to the internet through either router with signal strength at five bars. But if I try to run Firefox or Internet Explorer, I get the hourglass icon for about five seconds, and then the cursor becomes the normal arrow again and nothing else happens.

So, I connected the laptop directly to the router with Ethernet. Same thing happened. I get excellent connectivity by Ethernet to the same router with my desktop (15 Mbps, probably not much by you guys' standards, but the fastest it it is possible to have in this part of Mexico) without any problems.

Next, I connected the Toshiba laptop directly to the cable modem, bypassing the router and all the rest of the home network. Still no connectivity.

I took the laptop to the local computer repair place and the guy there had not the slightest difficulty getting connected, both by Ethernet and by wireless. He plugged it in and it worked perfectly right out of the box, and even though he played with it for an hour or so, he could never get it to fail. His ISP is the same one that I am using.

I took the laptop home, tried again, and I cannot even get a browser to load. I went to a MS-DOS prompt (this is XP) and pinged www.google.com and got the error that it can't find that host. My desktop computer, connected to the same router, pings it immediately.

So, why can every device in the house except the Toshiba laptop connect both wirelessly and by Ethernet to the internet, while that same Toshiba connects both ways with no problems at the computer shop?

I'm leaving in a few hours and will be away from computers (unless the Toshiba miraculously begins working right once I get away from home) so I won't be able to reply to this thread for about three days.

tanstaafl.

All sorts of things could be wrong here, but I suspect maybe DHCP has been turned off and static IPs set? Although the computer shop situation seems a bit wierd.

Connect ethernet to router and run "ipconfig /all" from a command prompt and paste here?

Possibly you have some different to normal IP settings at home (most would use 192.168.1.0/24 on their home network with 192.168.1.1 being the gateway and DNS server).

Are you sure the laptop is the culprit here, and not your router? Can you connect any other pc foreign to your normal home setup to your router without a problem?

This may sound stupid, but have you tried power-cycling your router?

Is the router configured to force a certain Ethernet wire speed, and the laptop does not have the hardware, or is not configured, for that wire speed?

10mbps vs. 100 or 1,000 mbit

Try using a different port on the router, and a different Ethernet cable.

Warning: random train of thought follows.

Something specific about XP? Hm.

The problem with the wireless, for instance, might be that XP doesn't, by default, speak the newer WiFi security protocols. If that's the problem, there are downloads to help you out:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=3914
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=1974
... but that's just a wild guess.

Wired... I don't know what the issue is there without a hands-on look a the thing.

Hm. Now that I think about it some more...

The fact that you have the same problem with both wired and wireless, indicates to me that the problem is in the configuration of your router. First guess is that there's something wrong in the routing table, and it's messing things up just for *that* computer's MAC address. I wonder if, on one of the interfaces, you could spoof the MAC address to something different to force the router to think it's a different device.

Well, anyway, the first base diagnostic steps are to go into the TCP/IP properties/configurations of the Wireless and Wired interfaces, and make sure everything is set to the defaults, i.e., "automatic" for all the TCP settings. In other words, no hard-coded Gateway IP address, or DNS settings for example.

If all that looks good, force a DHCP refresh:
IPCONFIG /RELEASE
IPCONFIG /RENEW
IPCONFIG /FLUSHDNS

If that doesn't fix it, try to narrow down whether the problem is a DNS issue or a TCP routing issue. Do it like this:
- On a *working* computer, ping www.google.com and see what IP address it gives you.
- On the non-working computer, ping *the IP address directly*, not the name.

If the IP address works, then your issue is entirely DNS-related, and your network interface and routing is fine. Start looking for reasons that DNS might be malfunctioning.

Other things to try:

The fact that it worked when it moved to the computer repair guy's network means it's something about YOUR network. When you tried plugging it into the cable modem, is EVERYTHING ELSE on that network turned off and/or disconnected from the cable modem? For instance, maybe the bad computer has the same IP address assigned as one of the good computers that's already on the network, and so the good computer is already up and running on the network so the bad computer can't work.

Hm. What if this computer had Internet Connection Sharing turned on, and it only active when it's at your house?

If none of the above works, give us the output of:

IPCONFIG /ALL

We'll see if anything looks fishy in there.

When you did this step, did you power cycle the cable modem? If you didn't, the cable modem may have been only willing to talk to the MAC address of your router, not the laptop. Many cable modems require a full restart to change what MAC address they will route to.

As for your WiFi, do you have it protected by a password? If so, see Tony's information about needing to patch XP to support more modern WiFi security protocols.

Long story short... After about a week without internet, I am now [sort of] connected, thanks to my wife's little netbook and NO thanks to a Catch-22 situation with my LastPass password management program being set up to not recognize any ISP that wasn't in Mexico. I needed to edit my LastPass settings using a link they sent to my Gmail, and I couldn't get into my Gmail without the password from LastPass. I finally telephoned a neighbor in Mexico, had her go into my house, start my computer get into LastPass, edit the Gmail link and read me the password, so that I could go inhto my Gmail and change the password to something I could deal with. The old Gmail password? @nP%91FAKvSx Dunno why I couldn't remember it off the top of my head!

Anyway... the laptop in question has serious enough problems that I think I'll have to nuke and repave it. I took it to a computer store here, and there was no internet connectivity... UNTIL he restarted it in Safe Mode, then it worked just fine. He suggested a virus. I don't have the patience to go through rebooting it 40 times with different processes disabled to determine which one is gumming up the works, and there is NO data stored on the laptop that is of any importance.

We're going back to Mexico on Sunday, will arrive in the [very] wee hours Monday morning. The Honda (the reason for the trip) was sold, $12,000 cash money in hand, within four hours of the For Sale ad appearing on Craigslist!

tanstaafl.