weird network problem

So for some reason, after maybe an hour or 2, all of the network "stuff" i have on my vostro running XP suddenly stops.

by that i mean that the blue wifi light on the right side turns off, it says the systray icon shows no activity but doesnt show anything disconnected, everything in Network Connections shows up as "disabled" and opening network connections crashes everything and the only way to fix it is to kill explorer.exe. im not really sure what causes it at all. i thought i would set all of my setpoint settings back to default and then reinstall windows and then all of my drivers, and i'll also open up the bottom to make sure that the dell guy put everything back together correctly. he might have been in a bit of a rush, cuz he also had forgotten to lock my CPU in place when he put it all back together.

 

That sounds weird...it could be a network card getting too hot or a loose card...

 

another thing, and this happened with my girlfriend's laptop too (which i set up): when the computer tries to connect to internet, be it LAN or wireless, it just says "acquiring network address". the internet works just fine, but for some reason it sticks to that aquiring network adress message. after i plugged it into a dsl modem that was turned off, and then turned the modem on, it never changed the iconn from "limited or no connectivity".

looking at this, i thought that maybe it was because i tweaked the HungAppTimeout and WaitToKillService values to a smaller number, because thats what i did on my girlfriend's computer, but when i checked my own registry, i found that i hadnt modified it at all.

so now im completely lost as to why both our network things do the same thing. i didnt tweak any network settings, and hers is pretty much a fresh install. were using windows XP sp2.

any help is appreciated.

 

Your laptop sounds like it has a hardware problem, so I would open it up and check for loose cards, etc. While you're in there, get a can of compressed air and give it a good cleaning.

Your girlfriend's laptop sounds like a software related issue. You can try to remove and reinstall the drivers for the wireless and ethernet cards, and also do a registry scan and repair any errors.

The only thing I see in common is that you set both computers up (hmmmmm...) Actually, the router/modem is also a common thread, so you might want to reset the router/modem to default settings, and then reconfigure with your custom settings.

 

i've already had both my wireless and lan cards replaced in both mine and my girlfriend's computer, including getting everything cleaned out.

i know it must be either my fault or something in a windows update that messed up. i've tried soft installing windows XP too (installing over the current c:/windows directory without having to delete all files off of the computer).

also, both of our drivers are completely up to date, and i also have NetBIOS over TCP/IP enabled, because someone said that would fix it, and that did nothing.

the router/modem has also been reset, plus it happens with all different connections, not just one specific one. this includes university wireless for both our campuses, university LAN for both campuses, and wireless at her house and wired at her house.

there must be something either with the registry or with the services that are enabled/disabled. although i didnt mess around with those on her computer at all, they are all on default settings.