[1969GiPper]

About 7 months ago I purchased my first computer for the home. It's a Gateway Model GT5618E. My internet service is from AT & T. Everything has been working fine until late last week. When I went to connect to the internet nothing would happen. The first thing I noticed was that the ethernet light on the motorola modem (from AT & T) was not on. I contacted AT & T for help and that was a painful experience to say the least. They said that problem was in my network interface card or my ethernet cable.

By chance I had my laptop computer from work home with me so I connected it to the ethernet cable (already connected to the motorola modem) and the ethernet light on the modem immediately came on and I connected to the internet. Based on that I new my ethernet cable and modem are working fine. So I disconnected the ethernet cable from my work laptop and again connected it to my Gateway. Still no internet connection and the ethernet light on the modem is out. I also noticed that the light on the back of my Gateway is not lit when the ethernet cable is plugged in. So I tried a few different diagnostics and I always end up getting the message "local interface connection unplugged". Just for laughs I tried anothe known good ethernet cable and got the same results. It would work on my work laptop but not on the Gateway. So I figured the guy from AT & T was right about my network interface card being the problem.

So I packed up the computer and took it back to Best Buy and gave it to their Geek Squad to figure out. He connected it to their internet cable and the ethernet light on the back of the computer immediately came on and he was able to access the internet. He ran all kinds of checks and couldn't find anything wrong. Said it wouldn't do any good to send it back to the factory because they too will find that it works fine. While at Best Buy they said that the problem could be related to the Norton 360 software and the Macafee software not workinig together. So they removed the Macafee. That didn't help.

So in summary:

If I connect my Gateway computer to my ethernet cable/modem at home, it won't connect to the internet.

If I connect my Dell laptop from work to the same cable and modem at home, the laptop will connect immediately to the internet.

If I take my Gateway computer to another location (Best Buy) and they connect their cable to it, it will immediately connect to
the internet.


Any ideas?

By the way, I'm sending this message using my Dell laptop using the ethernet cable/modem that won't work with my Gateway.