No IP found issues

sweavesweave boston
edited July 2009 in Hardware
Sorry if this is going to sound rather vague but a friend recently asked me to look into why his system cant seem to find an ip address.
no matter what he does he has never been able to get an ip to register on the system (i believe the address he gets back are just zeroes)

he has tried switching network cards, tried the system at different locations, tried reformatting and so forth.

it is a 3 year old dell system running on windows xpsp2 (sorry i dont know the make #)

does anyone have any guesses or can point me to any diagnostic tools that could help?

also in the past he has only had access to dial-up (crappy apartment he used to live in) but is now considering getting either cable or dsl in his new place so is curious if perhaps a stable ip will help him out.

thanks for any assistance

Comments

  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited July 2009
    Laptop? Desktop? Ethernet or wireless?

    Has he never had an IP address or is this a new issue?
  • Nate_LapTNate_LapT Ferndale MI. Icrontian
    edited July 2009
    being you said he was previously dialup and looking to get real internet, Im assuming he doesnt have a router
    possibly running ICS to share the dialup, or was just connecting one at a time via dialup?
  • sweavesweave boston
    edited July 2009
    it is a desktop
    he had at one point had an ip address but not for internet.
    he had a program that required an ip address for activation so he put in a network card and that gave him a useable ip but he didnt connect to the internet back then as far as i know.

    his dialup as far as i understand was by connecting to his phone line (no network was involved)
  • Nate_LapTNate_LapT Ferndale MI. Icrontian
    edited July 2009
    well to get an ip on that type of network, ONE of the pc's will need to be setup as a dhcp server, which with windows generally is ICS internet connection sharing, but if he's going to dsl ect, a router will be needed.

    if he just needs to network the 2 for now he either needs a switch, or a crossover cable to directly connect the two. or two wireless devices in ad-hoc.
    then staticly assign an ip within a class C range, generally being 192.168.1.1 - 192.168.1.255 with *.1 being the gateway (router, ics machine) and *.255 broadcast, basically dont put a system on that ip.

    as long as both machines are within that range they can see each other.

    if he's just wanting to prep them for broadband, pick up a router, I like the linksys wrt54G line myself. Prime has a link to buy through newegg so grab that prior to buying.
    and with the router none of the steps above need to be used, just plug it in, and generally it should throw you an ip, which then you can manually configure the router, or let the cd do the work for you.
  • RichDRichD Essex, UK
    edited July 2009
    What is he trying to do? Why does he need an IP?

    There are two methods of using IP addresses, Static IPs and DHCP. Static IP addresses allow you to manually assign an IP adress Subnet mask and gateway where as DHCP does it automatically. You have A DHCP server and that is responsible for assigning IP addresses to devices.

    If he upgrades to DSL you will need a router. That router will have its own IP address and it will also function as a DHCP server. All you need to do is plug in your PC to the router and make sure that your PC is set to obtain its IP from a DHCP server. This means that evertime your computer connects to the network it is assigned an IP address. If you have several computers on the same network you may find that the IP address that your PC is assigned is different everytime you log on. In 99.9% of cases this is fine.

    Incidentally if you want to find out your network settings as the are now then click on start --> Run and type CMD and hit enter.

    This will launch command prompt. The type "ipconfig /all" (without the speechmarks) and hit enter This will tell you all of your network settings
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