Networking Issues - Conflicting IP Address?

[monkey0506]

Here at my parents house we have DSL. It's pretty nice, and we had a router so that my mom could get on the internet from her laptop from anywhere in the house. Her laptop has completely died now, but that's okay.

The reason I'm posting is because for the past few weeks whenever my little sister turns on her computer the main computer as well as hers completely lose internet access. My sister's computer is directly wired to the modem and it worked perfectly fine before (although it did slow down the connection when we were both on).

Both computers are running Windows XP (although how my sister's computer runs XP is beyond me...it only has a 2 GB HDD and 512 MB RAM...slow as crap too). My sister started complaining about her computer asking her what connection she wanted to use or some such and I wasn't exactly a good big-brother and help her out...so she decided to take care of it herself.

Now it seems (I'm not really sure because I don't know all that much about networking) that her computer is trying to assign the same IP address to her computer as the main computer is already using (I say this because once or twice an error message has said there was an IP address conflict with another computer on the network).

I've tried to remove and re-setup the connections and run all the Windows XP network wizards and searched the Windows help-file (lot of good that did me -.-")...and I'm at a loss. I'm hoping that perhaps someone around here that knows a bit more about networking than myself can help me out here.

Thanks,
monkey_05_06

[Phemar]

Try this (I'm no good at networking either but this is what I would do)
1. Unplug your sister's cable.
2. Check what IP address your main PC is using and write it down.
3. Instead of automatically retrieving an IP address set your main PC to connect with the one you wrote down.
4. Plug your sister's cable back in (make sure her PC is set to automatically retrieve an IP address)

And maybe that will work. Not too sure as I'm not TOO good at networking.

(if that doesn't work go back to step 3 and change the last digit of the IP address maybe.)

[monkey0506]

Does anyone else happen to have any ideas on what the problem is and/or how to fix it?

[dasjoe]

Well, the message tells you the exact problem.
Your sister's machine has the same IP as some other thing, and since there's only two pcs and a router in your network it's either your pc's or the router's.
Just assign (different, obviously) fixed IPs to the two pcs, put them in the same subnet and you should be fine.
Set the router's IP as the standard gateway and dns server IP to enable internet access for your pcs.

Google will tell you how to do it if you don't understand what i just said.

[Alynn]

or for some reason she has a static IP setup on hers while yours is DHCP, most home based routers have DHCP enabled so each computer will pull the correct IP addy, in which case just make sure both are set to get an IP address automatically.