pileduptohere
Topic Starter
Hi, I've been searching here and other resouces for almost a week now to figure out how to get my computer to connect to the internet again after some problems. I've read that others have had the same problems and have tried their "fixes" but the problem is technology has finally surpassed my abilities (I figured this would happen when I got "old" like my parents who haven't bothered to keep up with the tech-world, not at 34 when some of my most important communication is via internet.) Here's what happened…
Last Saturday morning while surfing the web a message popped on the screen that said my computer was at at risk of being infected by spyware or a virus or something. I ordinarily would ignore such a message but in the year-and-a-half that I've had this computer I've never really become ccustomed to Vista and all of its pop-up messages and programs like Windows Defender and such. So, I clicked it (it looked fairly official) and, despite the bad feeling I had about it, I cliked run in the next box that asked me to run or save. Obviously, I had just allowed some sort of program to run on my computer now I was getting new little messages in the form of those annoying word bubble like things from the taskbar. I tried to run McAfee to see what I'd done but it no longer worked (more word-bubble messages). Finally, I thought I should just restart the computer and when I closed out of everything my desktop background had been changed to a blue (but patterned) screen with a red WARNING message. Oh, carp**! It was obviously infected with something. Restart, didn't work. This bug made it so I couldn't access any programs through my account. However, wen I went into my husbands I was able to run McAfee. That seemed to clear things up somewhat. For instance, I could now see my regular desktop background. But I couldn't access the internet through either account. I've had my share of other weird "bugs" in the past and decided setting the computer back to factory, though a monster pain with saving everything and updating everything again, should rid me of the bug and I'd deal with getting it set up the way I like it at a later time. It didn't work.
To make matters worse, apparantly our cable payment hadn't been aplied to our account. So while I was working on these issues I notice that we had no TV. I correctly assumed we had no internet either but after the payment issue was cleared up and the TV was working we still couldn't connect to the internet. So here's the beginning of all the things we've been through to this point:
The cable peple helped us detirmine that it wasn't on there end of things and suggested we try a new ethernet cable. We tried it… didn't work. She had me check things with ipconfig/all and didn't like what it said. We checked the Network Adapters in Device Manager and she said we were missing the ethernet adapter. So she gave me the webaddress to get the driver for it. That lady and I parted ways and I was now on my own. I downloaded that, installed it (I think but everything looked like it did before in that area)… didn't fix it.
I bought a new modem hoping to bypass the ethernet deal all together and use a usb cord… even with the cd I couldn't download the necessary driver.
By the way, everything cable modem related was working well and connected just fine when I hooked my husband's laptop to it - which is how I'm getting by right now.
After each thing I tried I rechecked ipconfig/all and always got "media disconnected" for every thing that came up on the list (this is the stuff I don't really understand at all) So I searched the web for ways to fix this. Eventually, I got to a point where there was no longer the red X on the connection icon in the taskbar. Instead there was a yellow exclamation triangle. After checking ipconfig/all again only the "tunnel adapter 6" was disconnected. And when I go to the network and sharing center it says I have "limited connectivity" which really means NO connectivity because I still can't get to the internet.
I went to the acer website and downloaded all the drivers it says should be on my computer, an Acer Aspire X1200 running Vista 64-bit, and put them on a disk. But I don't know what to do with them because I cannot even figure out what the ethernet adapter driver is called.
It's taken me days, obviously, to get this far because I can barely string together an hour each day for this detective work as I keep getting interrupted by my 3 & 5 year old. So, if you post to me it might take me a lttle time to follow you directions and respond back but I will get back to you. I am so lost…. please help.
for sure! But… whammy for me… I still can't connect. Everything is as it was before. I haven't messed with anything but running the programs that Raktor asked for. And I'll just keep it that way til I hear back from you. And in that light, thank you for taking the time to work with those of us who know so very little in this computer world.
I only use a modem hooked directly to the computer via the ethernet cable (no router… haven't made it to the wireless world yet).
The modem is a Motorola Surfboard Cable Modem model # SB5101U. The internet sevice is provided by Charter Cable. I'm not sure what you mean exactly in #4 but I have done the 'unplug the modem, wait 60 seconds for it to reset, plug it back in thing' a few different times. On the other hand, it can't hurt to try it again but can you tell me in which order I should do everything, just so I know I'm doing it right. Thanks again.