I have an old (~7 years old) XP laptop, a Toshiba Tecra, that I need to revive after sitting unused for several years, to take on a trip that I am about to undertake. [See related post about Honda for sale]

I cannot get it to connect to the internet, either by Ethernet or by wireless.

I have my choice of two wireless routers in my house, and plenty of other devices (iPhones, netbooks, laptops, Android phones, iPads, etc.) connect seamlessly to the internet through either router with signal strength at five bars. But if I try to run Firefox or Internet Explorer, I get the hourglass icon for about five seconds, and then the cursor becomes the normal arrow again and nothing else happens.

So, I connected the laptop directly to the router with Ethernet. Same thing happened. I get excellent connectivity by Ethernet to the same router with my desktop (15 Mbps, probably not much by you guys' standards, but the fastest it it is possible to have in this part of Mexico) without any problems.

Next, I connected the Toshiba laptop directly to the cable modem, bypassing the router and all the rest of the home network. Still no connectivity.

I took the laptop to the local computer repair place and the guy there had not the slightest difficulty getting connected, both by Ethernet and by wireless. He plugged it in and it worked perfectly right out of the box, and even though he played with it for an hour or so, he could never get it to fail. His ISP is the same one that I am using.

I took the laptop home, tried again, and I cannot even get a browser to load. I went to a MS-DOS prompt (this is XP) and pinged www.google.com and got the error that it can't find that host. My desktop computer, connected to the same router, pings it immediately.

So, why can every device in the house except the Toshiba laptop connect both wirelessly and by Ethernet to the internet, while that same Toshiba connects both ways with no problems at the computer shop?

I'm leaving in a few hours and will be away from computers (unless the Toshiba miraculously begins working right once I get away from home) so I won't be able to reply to this thread for about three days.

tanstaafl.