My boss has been asking me questions about his home network for about a week now. After two telephone calls, and a couple of "things he could try" He lives to far away for me to go over and look at it. I have come up with this information as fact. the xp box in question connects through lan the xp laptop connects through wireless the vista box xonnects through lan His xp box will not surf the web. the laptop and vista box will surf trying to gain access to the router will not work using the ip 192.168.1.1 giving the xp box an address of 192.168.1.101 will not give access to the web. The vista machine has an address of 192.168.1.1 as well shutting off the vista box, unpluging the vista box, rebooting the router, and trying will not help the above situation. the xp box had a network bridge with IEEE1394. after reinstalling the card, disabling the 1394 still non of the above situations work. What am i missing,, or what should I ask him. the last phone call,, I told him to find his install disk, which he claims will not work from the xp box. I'm not to good at diagnosing over the phone,, but my next step is to have him reset the router, which he doesn't want to do, because it took him an hour with tech support from linksys to set it up last time. I'm not sure if he resets, that he can get the web back. any help with this would be great. If your not learning,, your just sitting there

Only start the xp box, which has got the problem to get to the internet. Configure the network card to get the ip address automatically from the router. Restart the xp box and see what happens. If this will work, start one of the other computers an so on.

have tried that. it keeps assigning him an address... but he cannot surf the internet. some sort of invalid 69.###.###.### address If your not learning,, your just sitting there

I guess some sort of 169.xxx.xxx.xxx address. That address is given, if no DHCP server is found and windows can't get an IP address. So the first step is to figure out, why the DHCP service at the router isn't working. When you solve this problem, the win XP box can surf the internet.

okay, how do I go about finding out what address the router is. none of the machines in his house can access the router using the address given in the pdf for his router. I have tried the default gateway but it is the same as what the router should be at,, no answer. How do I figure out what he, or the tech from linksys changed his router to? If your not learning,, your just sitting there

But there are PCs that can surf the internet via the router. So those machines must have configured the router as the standard gateway. In a dos box under windows, you can type in ipconfig /all There you'll find the standard gateway. The ip address of the standard gateway is the ip address of the router. I guess, the routers address is 192.168.1.1 So start only the PC with the ip address 192-168.1.101 to avoid address conflicts. In the Internet browser you can type in e.g. 192-168.1.1 and you should get a login screen.

Have him bring you just the router and its power supply. Connect any old pc to the lan and see if you can get a ip and if you can access the router. You DO NOT want to set the router to factory defaults until you know what the wan settings are. Not something your boss appears able to do. Imagine the power of knowing how to internet search http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/FindInfo.html