Quick and Easy networking question

[Spektyr]

I'm in the process of putting a network into my wife's parent's house. They've got an upstairs apartment that the wife and I are moving into in a couple weeks, and currently they run a straight connection between their computer and the cable modem. Very 20th century.

Now I'm not quite ready to move my main computer, router, and such over here but I've got the second computer and my wife's laptop here to "test" the network as I put it in. Unfortunately I've only got the one router, which is still at home keeping the big machine hooked up, so I'm making do with a little Netgear 5 port hub.

Here's the weird part:

On a brand-new install of XP the in-laws' computer will detect the internet with the modem plugged into the hub and the computer plugged into the hub. The laptop will detect and talk to the desktop when it's plugged into the hub, but it won't see or talk to the internet.

Furthermore, the laptop won't even see the internet plugged straight into the modem. It works 100% fine plugged into the router at home, though, and plays well with others on the network there. I don't know much about the cable internet here vs. the one where my wife and I live, but I can't imagine it being sufficiently different when all the settings under the various networking "Properties" windows are identical from laptop to desktop.


So what's the issue here? I've tried different cables, and the cable from the modem itself is known-good (since the other computer talks on it just fine)... I'm at a loss. Could the laptop be refusing to give up on finding a wireless connection? Would it be related to the laptop insisting every time it's rebooted that there's some "dummy" document in queue for a printer that's not even connected?

[Spektyr]

Still at a loss on this...

Is it maybe that because the hub doesn't do the whole "make nice with the modem on behalf of the whole network" thing the modem only picks one computer to talk to and sticks its proverbial nose up at the others?

If so, how would I go about getting it to talk to another computer instead of the current one? (If it's a one-at-a-time thing, how do I switch which one is online?)


This has got to be a blindingly simple question to someone out there...

[johnwill]

You have correctly identified the issue. Your ISP only gives you one IP address, first come, first served! There is a simple answer, it's called a broadband router!