Late last year, I had a virus on my Toshiba Satellite laptop running Windows XP. It’s been awhile, so I’ve forgotten what the virus was, but I think it’s the one that redirects search results to malware. I’m always surprised when I get a virus because I rarely download videos, music, or software. I’m mostly surfing websites for research for blog entries and whatnot. I have AVG Anti Virus installed and running. Still, every so often, I’ll get a nasty virus that’s difficult to remove.

After finally nuking the virus last October or November, my internet stopped working. When I tried to connect to a network, it would just hang on “Acquiring network address...” I remembered trying a bunch of stuff, but no luck.

I was thinking maybe it’s finally time to re-install windows, but the CD-ROM no longer works. I bought a portable one, but the USB connection from the Satellite was too weak to power it.

At the time, I was also pondering getting a Zenbook because the Satellite was ancient and weighed about twenty pounds. It’s a desktop replacement, so it’s not very portable. I did end up buying the ultra thin Zenbook and got my work done on it, so the no connection issue on the Satellite was kinda forgotten.

Last night, I decided that I would give it another try. I did a google search and came upon a solution on Microsoft Answers. It had a list of things to try.

First on the list was making sure that the DHCP service was on. It wasn’t. I started it manually, but still no internet.

Next was resetting the IP stack. I did. Rebooted. Still didn’t work.

The last things to try were two repair programs. The first, LSPFix, was another no-go. The second, Winsockxpfix, did find a problem with my TCP/IP and repaired it. I rebooted, but still couldn’t get online; the good news is the TCP/IP error message that I had been getting before at startup was gone.

I then went back to the beginning of the list and checked if the DHCP service was started. It still wasn’t, so I manually started it.

This time, it worked, and I was finally able to get online. Yay!

The only problem was when I restarted the computer, DHCP was still off even though it was set to turn on automatically during startup.

Following one of the commenter’s advice, I checked the Event Log and saw that one of the services that DHCP depends on failed to start. That was AFD, which can be found in the Device Manager if you show hidden devices. The startup type was set to “system.” I changed it to “automatic.”

After that, DHCP starts up automatically and my internet connection works again. After eight months, I’ve finally found a solution.

As a desktop replacement, I like my Satellite. It has a 17” screen, and performance is decent on Windows XP.