I spent all morning trying to get online with my regular (main) computer, to no avail.
No connection, and when I went to the command prompt, I was able to ping no sites at all. Even a loopback (127.0.0.1) yielded an annoying error code (which seems to have frustrated many a techie):
IP Driver Error Code 2
Entering IPCONFIG and IPCONFIG /ALL did not work:
Unable to query host name
I reinstalled the nic card, uninstalled and reinstalled TCP/IP, and ditto the Winsock. Nothing worked. I also tried various “netsh” commands. Nothing would work. I ran Malwarebytes which could not update itself because I can’t get online, although it found and deleted a single malware item.
Hoping the nic card was my problem (it is internal), I rebooted the machine into Ubuntu Linux using a DVD. Unfortunately, that worked! I got right online.
Which means there is nothing wrong with my hardware, and everything wrong with Windows.
Ugh.
It’s nice to have a blog to complain to, though.
Comments
5 responses to “Wasted morning”
Welcome to a terminally-borked Windows TCP/IP stack. A few have found the needed mystic netsh incantations to fix this, but most opt for a Ripley, take off, and nuke the site from orbit.
Merde like this is why I’ve been in the habit of reformatting & reinstalling every 6-9 months since XP came out.
find (online)the drivers for the nic,and upgrade before you nuke the OS
Since you probably need Windows for certain tasks, may I recommend switching to Linux for the important stuff. Don’t know much about it, but I do know it is more stable than XP (for instance) could ever be.
Ask around about Red Hat and Denebian and learn which works better for you.
There’s usually one of two causes for this – a borked driver, or a borked LSP stack.
Use another computer and go to http://www.bleepingcomputer.com and look over the spyware removal tutorials before you do a brain wipe.
There’s rather a lot of older spyware that inserted itself into the LSP stack (the guts of Windows networking) and when it was only partially removed would bork the network.
[…] NOTE: My main computer is still down, so this post is being published from my old laptop running Ubuntu Linux. Hope there are no […]