I am having a very annoying problem that I have never had before. I cant get my computer to connect to the internet. I know this is because for some reason my computer will not release and renew my ip. I went and bought a brand new card, plus tried a coupls of NIC's that my friend had lying around, and still no internet. I am running my computer into a netgear hub and the dsl line into the uplink. My friends computer is also plugged into the hub and he can release and renew just fine. He gets the internet and I dont. How frustrating. Anyway I'm running xp pro and any help would be nice. Thankx.

Hi there, First, you should check who is giving you an ip address. is it you dsl company or dhcp server (netgear router? or hub?). oh, hub does not assign you a private ip addr. If you are subscribing to a dsl, you should get a static addr, i think. Maybe it depend on what region you are living at. one suggestion, ask you friend not to use his comp. for a day (meaning shut it down for a day) and try typing ipconfig /? in the command prompt. "/?" is help using the ipconfig command. there, you will see 'release' and 'renew'. use release first, then renew ex. ipconfig /release ipconfig /renew you know that a hub is like a repeater, right. well, that means one line (dsl) sharing with two guys. If your friend is downloading a mega huge file, you will face low bandwidth for you comp. (meaning it takes a long time for you to connect to site because he is taking most of the bandwidth. hope that helps.

Couple of things you should try. First, you don't need a static IP address from your ISP. Simply verify that your ISP is giving you 2 dynamic IP addresses. This is important because if you are paying for 1 IP address then the first computer to renew it, gets it. That could be why you can't renew when your friend connected If you don't want to pay for another dynamic IP, then you have no choice but to get a router. That way, both computers share 1 IP adress and the router assigns a different "private" IP to each computer connected. If you are going to use a router, I would suggest getting a router/switch combo since they are cheap and you will get the benefit of a switch instead of a simple hub. The difference here is that a hub splits the bandwidth and the router distributes it. For example, 10 Mbps shared between 2 computers on a hub is 5 Mbps each. Through a switch, it is still 10Mbps each. Hope this helps, feel free to drop me a line and ask more questions. Email me at abacchus@telus.net

First, verify that your ISP is giving you 2 or more dynamic IP addresses. If so, try XP Windows sockets fix at: http://members.shaw.ca/techcd/WinsockXPFix.exe If not, buy a router. Good luck!