Alright, I am home for the weekend and I got online and noticed that we were "stealing" someone's wireless internet. It was automatically connecting to our neighbor's unsecure wireless router. My family doesn't have a wireless router because they just have a computer, no laptops or anything like that so really no need for a router. They connect to the internet directly to the box with an ethernet cable. However if I disconnect the wireless connection, I'll be connected to LAC (our box) through the ethernet cable but alas... no more internet. Looking at the Network and Sharing page through the Control Panel, my PC is connected to the network, but not connected to the internet. I'm not really a networking techie, but I know my way around the computer well enough. I tried calling where we get our internet from, but I gave up after having no real luck with them... Our box has the correct lights on (Power, Ethernet, DSL, and Internet) but I'm not getting internet unless I am connected to someone else's wireless router. Can anyone help me out here??
After some trouble shooting, I Figured out the problem... somehow the settings were changed to basically use only a specific IP Address. No idea how or why it changed but I set it back to automatically obtain an IP Address and it works now.
You ISP has some sucky tech support if they couldn't help you with that. The first thing they should have had you do is an ipconfig. That would have probably told them what the issue was. You would have probably saw that your NIC had an ip address but no default gateway. That's a tale tale sign that your NIC is being assigned an ip statically.
I know, it's sad... I was being talked down to the entire time. "Click the round windows button at the bottom left corner." She kept telling me to log off to log in as an administrator. I kept telling her, "It automatically logs in as an admin because it's the only user account. I don't need to do that." Her reply? "Vista does not allow that." I seriously wanted to punch a hole in my wall at that point.
