Hey everybody! I needs me some help. I've got an old-ass PC, because I am not rich. It is running Windows XP and IE 6. The internet is working in our house. It's hooked up to my computer. My connection wizard (or whatever the thing is that tells you this stuff) says I'm connected and all is well. But I can't load any websites, no programs will connect to the internet, nothing happens.

Anybody got any ideas on how to fix this that aren't "Get a new computer?"

Have you done any Windows updates because sometimes they screw shit up big time.

BadComrade wrote:Try going to Start > Control Panel > Windows Firewall and then turning the firewall off.

I've tried it. No good.

I also haven't done any updates recently.

This is really frustrating...

Are you hooked up to a router?

in a webbrowser, can you go here?:
http://70.47.38.85/
(this is the electrical.com IP address)
if you can, your DNS setting, she is mysteriously disappeared.
I am not so sure how to fix... But you must fix, or forever be
typing numbers for addresses.

Your network card could have gone the way of the dodo.
They range from dirt cheap to ridiculously expensive.

Well, start with pinging the router/servers, no?

Try going to you command prompt

Start->Run, type "cmd"

Run the command "ipconfig" and see what ip address you have. If you are behind a router like a linksys or netgear, you should be getting an ip that starts with the digits "192". If you are getting "169" as your first three digits that is a windows default, for zeroconf, I believe. It won't get you connected to the internet.

If you have a 169-prefixed ip, turn off your firewall, and try the following commands in the command prompt

1st - type "ipconfig /release all"
2nd - type "ipconfig /renew all"

If those won't work just remove "all" from the command.

These commands will reattempt a connection to your router, and will try to get a DHCP assigned ip address.

So, I pinged the connections, and the default gateway IP was getting no response...

I switched myself to a static IP and that seemed to fix the problem, as I'm typing from my computer now. I wonder why, after two years of no problems, this suddenly happened?

If you had a recent power outage, your router may have reset itself. You may need to reconfigure some of its settings.

Mine linksys would occasionally do that before I put it on my battery backup.