[foofighter59]

I have a Netgear Router with the wireless adapter that has worked for about nine months with TIVO. Last week, I couldn't connect to the internet with my desktop, laptop or TIVO. I bypassed the router and the desktop will now connect to the internet. I am assuming the router went bad. All the lights work and I have unplugged and rebooted a number of times. Is there anyway to check the router, itself, to see if it is working at all or should I just pack it in and purchase a new one. It's only nine months old. I know this is more of a hardware question (rather than a TIVO question), but this board has helped me with a number of questions I have had in the past.

Thanks in advance.

 

[ThreeSoFar]

Does it give you a DHCP IP address?

Does it ping?

Can you browse to its IP address?

 

[foofighter59]

Thanks for your response. I feel stupid, but I don't know how to do any of that.

 

[dswallow]

If it's still under warranty, Netgear does offer an Advance replacement where they ship a replacement to you and then you ship your router back to them. Of course, if it isn't working at all then it's not like you need the replacement before shipping back the broken one.

http://kbserver.netgear.com/kb_web_files/n100002.asp

Generally in addition to what ThreeSoFar suggests, presuming all that works, I'd then see if you can traceroute to an outside IP address and see if domain name resolution is working -- maybe the router's working but your DNS server isn't.

 

[dswallow]

Thanks for your response. I feel stupid, but I don't know how to do any of that.

Your computer is hooked up to it, right? If your computer is configured for DHCP, it asks the router for an IP address when it boots, and if it gets one then DHCP is functioning. It might time out and assign a default one making it mostly useless -- the default one will start with 169. as I recall.

In a command prompt window, you can use the "ping" command to send a packet to a given address which will be sent back to you. This checks connectivity. So first thing is see if you can ping the IP address of your router. (ping a.b.c.d) where "a.b.c.d" is the IP address. If that works, try pinging another computer on your network; and if that works try pinging an outside computer on the internet (yahoo.com -- ping 216.109.112.135).

In your browser try going to http://64.236.24.20 and see if you get cnn.com (that's one of their addresses); that'll check if you can get to sites but not by name (meaning the name server is the problem).

 

[foofighter59]

Thanks for you help. I will try this.

 

[ThreeSoFar]

also in the command window, try:

ipconfig

It tells you your current IP information.

ipconfig /all shows more