Hey all, I'm having some really annoying internet difficulties. A bit of background, my internet always worked perfectly fine before. But a couple of days ago, my harddrive died and I had to get a new one. My old system was running Windows98, but I decided to make the jump to WindowsXP...
The Symptoms:
-Need to reboot router on computer start in order to get internet working (Windows will say my IP is 163.xxx.xxx.xxx or something instead of 192.168.a.b until the router reboot), I've never had this problem before
-After internet starts working, it will slowly slow down and then jerk to full speed then slow down further and keep doing so until it finally cuts out, after which another router reboot is needed. Again, never had this problem before.
-Other computer running Windows98 doesn't cause these problems, but is still affected when the router needs a reboot.
My thoughts:
-Is it possible that I damaged my network card or motherboard when installing the harddrive? But then, the router knows that I'm connected to it and the network card's green lights flash anyways, it's just that I can't access the router or the internet from my computer, even though the other computer can.
-I updated the router's firmware, no improvement and maybe it got worse even...
-I was unable to install some "mainboard utility" drivers or something, because they seem incompatible with WindowsXP or something (installing will trigger XP to detect other hardware which need drivers, and after drivers are installed, it asks to install the same drivers after the reboot, etc.). Is this potentially the problem?
-I installed a Windows2000 driver for my DLink network card to replace the RealTek(?) driver... but it wasn't officially guaranteed to be compatible, could this be a problem? I mean, I thought Win2K drivers should work...
SO, basically, I'm looking for any insights into why my internet isn't working, and how to fix it. Any suggestions?
