Ok, here is my problem. Well first off, I ran a network at my house with no problems with my old computer. I installed the software that came with the router and did the instructions and it worked fine. Now, however, is a different story. I am trying to do the same thing. The host computer (my parents) is the same, but my computer is new. I did everything I did last time, the router shows it recognized my network card, the network card shows it has a connection, but its not detecting the internet. I have done two things to try to fix this. 1. I made sure my TCP/IP was set at Obtain IP automatically (as the instructions say), yet still nothing. 2. I took it to the store where I bought it thinking it was a hardware problem, and they told me that since I first used it on my apartments DSL network, their DSL modem installed an IP address that is permanent for that network, so now I would have to manualy put in an IP address in the TCP/IP field. Now, I did ipconfig on my parents computer, got the ip address and tried entering that on my computer. Didn't work. I then took my parents computer off the network, patched the cable modem directly to my network card (off the network) and that still didnt work. No matter what I do, my network card is not recognizing any IP but the one that is back at my apartment. How can I get rid of this installed IP? I won't be back at my apartment till 2004, so this is an emergency. Thanks for any help.

There is no such thing as an installed IP address. Is your router doing DHCP? If so, are you getting an IP address? You should be getting something, at least an APIPA address of 169.254.XXX.XXX, which would mean that your computer is not getting an IP address from the router. Are you getting link lights on the NIC and the port on the router that it is plugged in? If not, it might be a hardware issue. It could be a port on the router is bad or the NIC is bad.

Yes I am getting an IP address. Its 169.254.X.X. And yes, the NIC light is on, the router is showing its detecting a connection on the second port, but still nothing. How do I get my computer to detect the IP coming from the router?

Sounds like you might want to check to see if your parents router has mac address filtering turned on.

I shouldn't have to change anything with the router. Its the same one I used before, it worked fine. I have my parents comp connected to the router and its working fine so I know its not the router, its my pc or my network card.

The original setup could have been done using Static IP addresses instead of DCHP. You need to check how the IP address was set up on your old machine and your parents machine. If they were not set up to automatically obtain IP address you will have to find out what your old machine was setup as.

The IP address you said was assigned to your computer is used for 'local link' when a PC configured to use DHCP and the PC cannot find a dhcp server to allocate an IP address. I still believe your problem is with your router. You might want to check to make sure your setting are correct.