Connected to home network but no internet

Hello,

umm well for about 6 months now i've had my laptop (with vista premium 32 bit) and i was connected wirelessly to my home network with no problems. Then all of a sudden a few days ago (13th or 14th to be precise) at midnight i no longer had any internet connectivity. I was browsing the internet, watching a video, from a little before midnight till 12:30 and when i was done i noticed the loss of internet connection.

When i try to troubleshoot the problem i get the "cannot communicate with primary DNS server".
I CAN access my home network (sent a file to our desktop computer's shared folder and recieved it just fine) but my internet connection is down. When i check in Network and Sharing Center i see the line from my PC to the home network in green but the one from home to internet is Xed.

On the other hand, my brother (who also has vista on his laptop) did not get this problem and any other periferal accessing the router (wii, xbox360, DS) can all access the internet.

I HAVE checked on the internet for resolutions to my problem, but they were all fruitless. My IP IS in the same range as my router, my default gateway and DNS server are the IP from the router and of course the subnet has the right configuration.

On the other hand, when i bring my laptop to school (which has wireless internet of course) my laptop can connect to it without a hitch.

My guess is that the problem may be a vista update (seeing as how the problem started at midnight... and i believe the updates are set to start at midnight)
On the other hand, i doubt the problem is a virus or anything like it because i did a system restore the day after i noticed the problem. The restore was set to the day before the problem occured. Needless to say the problem wasnt resolved.

I would be very grateful to anyone who could help me XD and thank you in advance to anyone who tries.

edit: oh and by the way im running on a dell Inspiron 1720... my brother (who CAN get internet with vista) is running on an HP.

You could try flushing your DNS

ipconfig /flushdns

Hope that helps!

ok ummm i tried that (had to make a shortcut to my cmd on my desktop to run as administrator if anyone else wants to try that lol)... unfortunately didnt help

what exactly is that suppsoed to do? when i follwed it with an ipconfig /all my DNS server was still the same (my router's IP) and i still couldnt access internet... from all i can tell the /flushdns had absolutely no effect O.o

thank you for trying to help anyways XD

Flushing your DNS cache should have cleared out any lingering dns issues you are having.

Since you're connecting wirelessly, have you tried deleting the wireless profile that vista stores for your home network? Since it works at school, that rules out any software or hardware issues and leaves the information that vista stores to "Connect automatically".

It would be found in the network and sharing center and to the left you should see manage wireless networks. My suggestion is to delete the profile for your home wireless and reconnect. Its going to take you through the steps as though you were connecting for the first time to the network, updating any settings as well.

Or have you already tried this?

just tried that... removed dlink (its our home network) from my list and then re-connected to it but my internet connection still doesnt work

another thing i tried was pinging my router... on my laptop it didnt work but from our workstation it did

maybe the problem lies in the router?... it might not know what to do with the packets it recieves from me so it just flushes them?

That pretty much rules out your computer then. In that case, definately check your router settings. Specifically, I would look at MAC filtering, DMZ and Port Forwarding. Out of curiousity, what router are you using (i.e Linksys, DLink) and are you using a static ip?

ok well its a D-link with dynamic IP
mac filtering is ON but my mac adress is in the allowing list (been that way for a while)
shouldnt have any problems since nothing has been changed for a while in it and no updates happened for it since 2007 (and the problem started like 5 days ago now)...
which means the problem pretty much has to be on my laptop XD but i have no idea as to what the problem is...

i might just try to save the files i want to keep somewhere else and ummm... cant remember the term for it but i think its re-initialize... my laptop XD lol (the thing where i erase all my files and start off with a fresh vista installation lol)

Before you take that plunge, try disabling MAC filtering if you haven't already. From experience with my D-Link, mac filtering was glitchy. Did what it was supposed to, but caused some wacky problems.

If you still can't get working, then a wipe may be your option. Hate for you to have to do that though.

tried to no avail unfortunately
i also tried giving my laptop a custom IP which should work and obviously made no difference

Ouch. you could delve deeper into your computer's network settings for something, but it might be easier to just scrub it after all.