Friends internet won't work

[Bucks]

My friend has cable internet and he has a home network set up. Then all of the sudden today, his main computer won't connect to the internet but his XBOX and other computer will. He reinstalled Win. XP and it still doesn't work. Could this mean his network card is blown out or something. Would it just happen like this with no signs?

Thanks

[robbie]

How old is the NIC card? Did he ADD another device to the network, and THEN it stopped working?!?!?
Rob

[loop]

What is the configuration of his home network? i.e how is he sharing the connection out to all those different machines?

[Bucks]

The NIC is less than a year old and it is a Linksys card. He hasn't added anything to his network in months. Has his main computer, secondary computer, and and XBOX connected. His secondary computer and XBOX can still access the interent, but his main computer suddenly won't. He hasn't made any changes to his network either.

[robbie]

What OS??!?!? Have you checked to see if the NIC is working properly in the DM?
Have you checked for viruses lately?!?!
Rob

[Daniel ~]

This may help, might not...

I'm networked by way of a router (Win 2000 pro)For along time time it worked great just using the Automatic settings. Then for some reason still unknown to me it just lost two of my boxes from right out of the blue!

What finally brought it back was filling in the DNS information by hand.
Since then it's never worked with auto settings, but has no problem if I give it the DNS information...go figure!

[Áedán]

Follow the standard diagnostics

Check that TCP/IP and network card are ok in networking/device manager.

Check IP addresses/DNS/gateways. See that the IP address is similar to the working machines, and that the DNS and gateways are identical. Under Win9x, use Start->Run and enter "winipcfg". Under NT/2K/XP, open a command line and type "ipconfig".

If that's all correct, the next step is to see if you can get some data there and back at a low level. From a command line on a working machine, type "ping <ipaddress>" where <ipaddress> is the IP address of the non-working machine. If you get a response back, then there's nothing wrong with the local network or hardware, and it must be a software issue (usually default gateway)

Áedán