THE PLEA & CARROT! Please help! Anybody who can provide me with the solution to the problem below, will get a crisp £50 note by return - I'm serious!! MY SET-UP I have a D-Link DSL-604+ wireless adsl router connected (wired) into my desktop and my adsl line (this router also contains an adsl modem). i have a laptop with a dwl-650+ card in also. THE PROBLEM: D-Link router seems to be working fine. I have entered all the ISP details required and the diagnosis test works okay, passes all four tests, i can ping external web-site ip addresses and it generally looks to be up and running. D-Link support seemed to think so too! My desktop is running XP and as I said is wired to the router physically. Again, I'm pretty happy that the physical set-up is okay. I can ping the router from the desktop okay, but I can't ping any external web-site IP's from the desktop and when i try internet exlporer i cannot access any web-sites at all. I seem to have tried various combinations of automatically getting IP addresses, configuring internet connection settings, network wizards and so forth but to no avail. Any help leading to successful resolution will absolutely be worthy of my crisp £50 note sat here on my desk - given i've spent £300 on networking gear that's sat on my desk blinking and looking pretty but not much else!! Yours hopefully, Tim

It's DNS problem.. Check with your ISP, and make sure your DNS entry is correct

Win XP has a built in firewall that can cause you fits. Make sure you disable it. If you need a firewall, after your connected get the free version of Zone Alarm or something like Black Ice Defender which are much better than what is built into XP. Larry

homeflash, larry, thanks for the ideas. tried the dns route but they seem fine - at least the router is selecting the right dns addresses. i tired overtyping the same dns addresses in my network bridge under network connections but it didnt seem to help any. larry, re: the internet firewall - what exactly do i need to do other than ensure the firewall is not checked in the network settings? many thanks -the £50 is still up for grabs!

I'm not a Win XP guy but I believe that's all you need to do. Just reboot and check your Network Places. But this seems like a router problem. Check to make sure you're not assigning a static IP or have PPPoE selected unless specificly told to do so by your ISP. If you can't ping outside your network, you don't have a live connection. Whether that is because your router's misconfigured or the line has problems is something you'll have to try and troubleshoot a little farther. But I'm confused. You say in one paragraph you CAN ping external web sites and then in the next paragraph you say you can't. Could you be a little more specific? Larry

Larry, Thanks for the message. Using the router web-based configuration software on my desktop, I can ping an external web-site by IP address (the only way it lets me ping using this software). i.e. if i ping 212.58.240.110 via the router software, I get the proper response. If I got to a command prompt on my desktop and try and ping the same ip address, it doesnt work - times out. From the same command prompt, if I ping the router on 192.168.0.1 I get the proper response. i.e. my desktop seems to be able to see the router, my router seems to be able to see the outside world (and all the diagnosis tests pass when i run them on the router web-based software) but my desktop cannot see the outside world! Is that any clearer? Not sure! Anyway, any further advice would be most gratefully received. I am convinced it is something pretty simple, probably my XP set-up which just isnt configured correctly! (A couple more bits of info: Everything is set to automatically get IP and DNS addresses. When I first set installed the network card, it automatically created a Lan Network connection which seems to pick up an IP address etc. okay when it all fires up. When I tried running Netowrk Wizard - it creates a network bridge - which has little effect other than the IP, DNS now get generated within the bridge network connection rather than the Lan network connection, but it all seems to 'work' in the same way. i.e. not giving me the internet access through my desktop.) Thanks in advance, Tim

Try disabling DNS in your Network Settings.