Im trying to connect an old PC to my wired LAN. The router gives my laptop an IP fine and I can access the router's IP fine too from that laptop. But with this old PC it gives me the evil '169.254.XXX.XXX' IP (ie. cant connect to DHCP). What steps should I take to troubleshoot why I cant get an IP from DHCP? I know its not the cable (since its the same one I used for the laptop), and I already ruled out a router problem the same way. I thought it might be a corrupt winsock since it had spyware when I first got to it (which I have since removed) but the usual winsock fix tool didnt seem to solve it. I have confirmed that the TCP/IP properties are set to automatically assign IP and Ive tried ipconfig /release and /renew to no avail. I can ping my own IP so I know the adapter itself is fine. Am I missing something?

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Yep..Go to router management page and check the DHCP setting, ensure that there is big enough IP range configured. If not, you can also configure the IP and other network info manually. Good luck..

As above. Test network stack with static address. Other factors may cause this too. I read it wrong and answer it wrong too. So get off my case you peanut.

Thanks for the responses. I'll check the DHCP range when I get home, though I would be surprised if the range didnt allow for 1 computer (ie. other than when I tried it with the laptop, this old computer is the only thing plugged into the router). I tried manual assignments based off of what I saw from the automatic ones from when I tried the laptop. The laptop got the following assigned from the router's DHCP when I had it plugged in: IP: 192.168.1.101 Subnet: 255.255.255.0 Gateway: 192.168.1.1 So I tried manually assigning the following to the old computer: IP: 192.168.1.102 Subnet: 255.255.255.0 Gateway: 192.168.1.1 But I still was not able to ping 192.168.1.1 or access the router admin page from the browser. So Im stumped. Part of me wonders if its some setting I dont know about, something about the PCs history (which I dont know much of... but it looks like it used to connect through USB Ethernet since the windows network scan showed a failure on something about USB. I actually just found out yesterday while trying to install Windows Defender that the copy of Windows on there is not genuine. :( So maybe I'll need to do a wipe/reinstall anyway since even once I get it on the net, it wont let me put SP2 on there) Considering that it can ping itself and that the network connections icon says its connected, is it possible that its a bad NIC?

If you can ping loopback 127.0.0.1 without problem, then there is no problem on the NIC.