Vista Network Issue - Says I'm Connected But Clearly Not

[hedmanmarc]

Have a bit of a problem. I live in a remote rural part of China and getting technical help here is near impossible. You need to go through a few translators and they have trouble finding what they need to find on my computer.

So about a week ago I left on vacation leaving my computer on to download some things. I come home and the internet has a limited connectivity warning. This is pretty typical and I deal with it going to limited connectivity on a regular basis. I restart the computer and it says I'm back on the internet. Green line to network and then to the little world icon. However firefox, my bittorrent client, thunderbird and everything else won't connect. And no matter what I do, no luck. I'm not very knowledgeable when it comes to network problems though.

Something similar happened a month or so ago when the internet stopped working all of a sudden when I would get a "network cable unplugged" message despite the cable clearly being plugged in. I read some forums and someone randomly suggested to switch my Speed and Duplex from Auto Negotiation to 10mbps - I did this and incredibly the internet worked. I have no idea what it actually did but it worked and I was happy. I don't know whether that information is superfluous but I thought I'd add everything.

Recent suggestions included updating the driver software for my ethernet card (did that and it didn't change anything - I have a Realtek 8101E Ethernet card), running a tracert to a bogus number (this yielded nothing but on the first hop it mentions my Default gateway number 192.168.41.100 and the rest are request timed out) and finally to check my event viewer and while I have done this and nothing looks suspicious I don't really know what to look for. Also I recently did a system restore from before the weekend I left. Nothing has worked.

If anyone could help me I'd be very grateful. I'm not all that computer savvy and I may have left out some important information so please ask for it and I'll get it. Also I'm not above forgetting something small or obvious so any suggestions would help. Even ones that anyone might normally catch.

Thanks in advance.

[dai]

moved you to networking

[johnwill]

Please supply the following info, exact make and models of the equipment please.

Make and exact model of the broadband modem.
Make and exact model of the router (if a separate unit).
Model numbers can usually be obtained from the label on the device.
If wireless, encryption used, (none, WEP, WPA, or WPA2)
Make and model of your computer.
Version and patch level of Windows on all affected machines, i.e. XP-Home (or XP-Pro), SP1-SP2, Vista, etc.




Please give an exact description of your problem symptoms, including the exact text of any error messages.

If you're using a wireless connection, have you tried a direct connection with a cable to see if that changes the symptoms?

If there are other computers on the same network, are they experiencing the same issue, or do they function normally?




On any affected computer, I'd also like to see this:

Hold the Windows key and press R, then type CMD to open a command prompt:

Type the following commands:

PING 216.109.112.135

PING yahoo.com

NBTSTAT -n

IPCONFIG /ALL

Right click in the command window and choose Select All, then hit Enter.
Paste the results in a message here.

If you are on a machine with no network connection, use a floppy, USB disk, or a CD-RW disk to transfer a text file with the information to allow pasting it here.