Worked for three hours, now says "Acquiring Network Address"

[danielledavis87]

Hi!

I'm new here, and I truly know very little about computer lingo, but I'll try to be specific.

Last night I bought, installed, and successfully used a Belkin G Wireless Router to connect from the main desktop PC in the living room, to my notebook in another room in the house wirelessly.

For about 3 hours, it worked great, then all of a sudden I lost connection and was not able to re-connect. It simply says "Aquiring Network Address" until it times out. I changed the method from automatic to manual, and tried again, and it still didn't work.....

I'm truly stumped...what would make it stop working mid-connection and not be able to reconnect? And how can I fix it?? I'm a college student and I REALLY need to get online for my midterms tonight.....

Thank you SO much for any input!

[Relztrah]

I'm far from the most knowledgable person here, but I would first power down all devices: desktop, laptop, modem, router, everything that has a plug. Then start from your internet source (probably your modem) powering up. Wait a minute and power up your router. Wait a minute and power up your desktop. Change the setting back to automatic. Does it connect automatically to your network? Try your laptop. Does it connect?

You might need to provide more information such as what version of Windows you're using, and how you connect--using a USB adapter or a PCI card. Your laptop very possibly has an internal wireless adapter if it's a newer one.

Another factor is the encryption. Whenever I can't connect to a wireless network, nine times out of ten it's because I've somehow got the WEP key wrong.

[Fruss Tray Ted]

Here's another less-than-stellar noob's advice from someone green as 'green eggs' in networking like me, but these are the things I do when my network goes 'poof'!

Besides the ideas above like cycling your modem, router and pc's laptops etc, I run the inetwiz in run box without email setup and it has saved me tons of time many, many times in the past. As recently as yesterday AAMOF!

I don't bother with pinging, and dropping to DOS for other reasons, we're using Windows. Let it do the work for you. Isn't that what it was supposed to do in the first place? :confused: