[datawiz]

The laptop is a Dell Inspiron 6000 whose hard drive crashed. I now have a brand new squeeky clean hard drive in there. Dell was kind enough to send me replacement disks for all the factory installed operating system and software. First step was to install XP Pro Media, Service Pack 2. I noticed right away there was no icon in the tray showing wireless networks in range. I didn't know if that was a feature of SP3 so I downloaded it onto my Mac, put it onto a flash drive, and installed it too. Still no obvious way to access the wireless network that all the other computers in the house can use just fine, and that the Inspiron used last week.

So I thought maybe it would be easier if I ran an ethernet cable between the router and the laptop. Now under Network Connections it says 1394 Connection, Connected, Firewalled, 1394 Net Adapter.

If I double-click that icon I get a status of connected, duration reasonably long, speed 400 MBps, but no packets under Activity.

If I click Repair this Connection I get:
Windows could not finish repairing the problem because the following action cannot be completed: Failure to Query TCP/IP settings of the connection. Cannot proceed. For assistance, contact the person who manages the network

that would be me :-(

How do I get the internet working?

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Do you have any errors in Device Manager?

[Broni]

Do you have any errors in Device Manager?

[datawiz]

I've got a whole bunch of yellow question marks with exclamation points on everything under Other devices.

I think I may be getting the idea now. Maybe I'm supposed to go on the internet to download the parts necessary to go on the internet. That's not very intuitive and I don't know how you would do it if you only had the one computer, but luckily I have this Mac on which I will try downloading a driver, putting it onto a flash drive and seeing if that fixes it.

[Broni]

Go to Dell's site, enter your computer service tag number and download all necessary drivers.

[Broni]

Go to Dell's site, enter your computer service tag number and download all necessary drivers.

[datawiz]

Thanks. Somehow the first time I had gone there the only driver download I found required that Dell search the computer I was connecting on to see what its service tag was. And of course since I was on a Mac that wasn't successful. But on your advice I figured I must have done something odd so I went and tried again and there it was, happy to let me download the drivers.

I got the drivers installed, managed to make all but one of the errors under device manager go away (for some reason the Video Device is still unhappy even though I downloaded and installed the video driver a couple of times. But I got my internet, both wired and wireless!

Thanks again for the kind help.

[Broni]

Yes!!