[rachael1989]

Okay, the computer that is primarily used by my mom and sister (meaning, not this one) recently crashed. In my mom's rush to get it up and running again, she ran a recovery CD that was Windows 2000. The computer had XP. That didn't work (since 2000, the version we have, is not wireless compatible). So she bought an XP Home Edition CD, and we ran it. Everything goes fine, it's up and running, and... no internet. No nothing, really. It was not detecting any kind of wireless internet, which we use (Yahoo! broadband), and even when we manually connected it to the internet with the ethernet cable, nothing. I finally found an XP recovery CD, so right now it's setting up the "factory settings" on it, but if that doesn't work, what should I do? Every computer I've ever gotten has never had this problem. They come nice and shiny and all set up and ready to go, internet and all. Now, the computer has absolutely nothing. Is there any way to fix it, or are we screwed? Thanks in advance if you can help out!

[rachael1989]

P.S. The recovery CD did absolutely nothing... :'(

[JustJudy]

It sounds like the nic wasn't installed. If you go into the properties of my computer, click on the hardware tab, then click on device manager, see if there are any exclamation marks or question marks by network adapter. If so you need to install the driver for that. If you don't know offhand which network card you have, you can pop the case and it's usually written on the card. If you have a Dell, you can go to their site and put in your service tag number and it will give you all the drivers for that computer.
If this isn't the case most likely your network card is bad.