I have an odd problem, I have a Dlink di-604 router, I have my main computer in the house beside the router,( it works great), I have another router in my shop, ( about a 60 foot run, Also working great),. My problem is the pc in my basement, I made a run of about 80 feet and it wouldn't connect. I have cable testers that say the cable is good. Thinking that maybe i pinched the cable, or, stapled to tight, or worse, put a staple through the line, I peeled out another 80 feet of cable and put ends on it. The cable tested fine with the tester but would not allow the pc to connect. I then proceeded to unplug from the computer downstairs and bring the other end of the cable upstairs and put it into the back of my other pc. This eliminated the chance that there was something wrong with the pc. Now I have eliminated the PC, The cable, what else could it be. I find it hard to believe that the router can't push a signal 80 feet. Please help, my daughter is driving me nuts. Barry If its not broken, fix it anyways.

Does your basement computer indicate that it's connected at all? Check your Local Area Network settings (if you have XP) and see if it's connected. If all is well, it should connect probably at 100 mbps depending on the cable/router config. If it says that the network cable is disconnected, we must isolate problem by then taking another network device and hooking it up to the basement computer. If it still says that the network cable is disconnected, then we have isolated the problem to the NIC card in the basement computer. We could also test your doubts about the cable distance by taking the router to the basement and connecting it with a short cable directly to the computer. If it works, then your NIC card is working properly and the problem lies elsewhere, such as an IP address. Typically, a home LAN network should connect with the "home base" computer as 192.168.0.1 and the "client" computers as 192.168.0.x (other than .1) What happens if there is a conflict is that one of the pc's will say "limited or no connectivity." That said, in order to further narrow down the problem, we need to focus on the basement computer. Has it been networked before? Is the NIC card working properly? Does it read other LAN devices? Is the IP automatically or manually configured? Does it say that it's connected or not?

Wait, I'm confused. How did you eliminate the computer? Did you bring it up and plug in a much shorter cable and it worked, or did you attach the 80-foot cable to one of your PC's near the router?

The pc that is downstairs was just moved there. I can bring it back upstairs and it works fine. Right now, i'm thinking that i got a bad box of cat5e. All my pc's have been networked before. What i did was make a 60 foot patch cable and lay it out on my livingroom floor, When i hook it up to my upstairs pc, it says that the network has limited or no connectivity. When i swap the wir for a shorter one, it all works fine. The 60 foot patch cable in question was tested two ways. It was tested with an ohm meter, and also rested with an rj45 network cable tester. They both confirmed that the wires are matched on both ends. I have eliminated the PC's. I have eliminated the router. The only thing left is the wire, but why? Thanks in advance barry. PS, all my systems are dhcp enabled and automaticaly get ip address. I had already run ipconfig, released and renewed. Using the cable in question, the system just hung trying to obtain an ip. If its not broken, fix it anyways.

The problem is most likely due to the fact that you're using 2 routers. How do you have them connected to each other? Are you connecting from a LAN port on router1 to the WAN port on router2? Are both routers acting as DHCP servers? What are the IP addresses, netmask and default gateway settings on all devices? Are all computers configured with the same workgroup name?

Ok, if you've ruled out the PC as the problem by taking it upstairs and plugging it into a known good cable then you have two things left that could be causing the problem: 1) Bad cable 2) Bad port on router First, swap the cable running downstairs into the port of a cable that you know is working. If this fixes the problem, then you have a bad port. If it doesn't fix the problem then either the cable is bad, or is too close to something that's causing interferance. It's not likely to be a bad box of cable if you tested the cable after making it and it tested good. The most likely suspect is interferance.

I got confused along the way, but if you are simply not receiving an IP Address, why not try and assign your daughter's PC a static address? If after applying static addressing information you realize a connection, you have an issue else where...