Diary of a Techie

My brother in law called me up last night. His notebook couldnt get an IP address from his router. This was just after someone installed a free anti-virus checker into it.
I had him do a system restore from the windows xp to ‘turn back’ the clock. This did not work. My other brother in law (TH) asked to have the hardware system ruled out as a cause of the issue. It is unlikely for both the wired and the wifi circuits to konk out at the same time. So we had him connect his router to the wired port instead of the wifi. This didnt work either.

So i suspected a corrupted TCP/IP stack. In the old days, we used to just go into the network neighborhood and in the properties, just uninstall TCP/IP and then reinstall it back.

Windows XP apparently doesnt give you such an option. From this Microsoft website, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/299357 , there is a complete instruction on how to do this by using the netsh utility.

The reset command is available in the IP context of the NetShell utility. Follow these steps to use the reset command to reset TCP/IP manually:
To open a command prompt, click Start and then click Run. Copy and paste (or type) the following command in the Open box and then press ENTER:
cmd

At the command prompt, copy and paste (or type) the following command and then press ENTER:
netsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt
Note If you do not want to specify a directory path for the log file, use the following command:
netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt

Hope this helps others out there as well.

Filed under: Computing