Internet problems...

[stevo1210]

I just bought an Asus eeepc for my brother. It;s the 701 series with a 4GB SSD hard drive and Windows XP home. I bought it second hand from a friend as he is selling everything off before joining the army. I got it for only $100 when these would retail for at least $200 second hand.
Anyway, all is fine and well... but I can't connect to the net. Through wireless or wired connections, I still have no success. I ran IP config though the command line and it seems to be able to see my modem, the IP address and domain exactly the same as my desktop PC reports back to me.
I have tried both Mozilla firefox and Internet explorer with no success.

What do I do to fix this issue?

Usually I'd just reinstall Windows, but this thing doesn't have a cd drive which is the problem.

Thanks.

[stevo1210]

Re: Internet problems...

Wait. is it possible to reinstall windows through the onboard card reader? it's classified as a hard drive in the "hard drives" section of the BIOS.

[washu]

Re: Internet problems...

Any firewalls or "internet security" suites besides the built in Windows one? Remove them. Don't disable, uninstall.

If that's not it try running Spybot in advanced mode and see if there are any LSP hacks.

You can re-install from the card reader. A USB CDROM is the easiest. If you have a USB HD you can usually hook up a regular CDROM drive of the same type to it as a temporary solution.

[stevo1210]

Re: Internet problems...

Any firewalls or "internet security" suites besides the built in Windows one? Remove them. Don't disable, uninstall.

If that's not it try running Spybot in advanced mode and see if there are any LSP hacks.

You can re-install from the card reader. A USB CDROM is the easiest. If you have a USB HD you can usually hook up a regular CDROM drive of the same type to it as a temporary solution.

There's only a Windows firewall and that's it. Even with that off, I still cannot connect to the internet. I do have an external 3.5" IDE HDD enclosure, and I shall use the controller on that for a cd rom drive. Good thinking mate! I didn't think of that earlier...

Thanks.

[willawake]

Re: Internet problems...

try other drivers
i remember with same model could not connect the wireless using that stoopid driver utility. worked ok with windows utility

[dood]

Re: Internet problems...

Does it have the DNS information?

Can you ping an external IP address?

[ratdude747]

Re: Internet problems...

make a bootable sd card... for a 700 series i'd recommend ubuntu netbook remix. test using that. windows is a poor choice for a 700 series.

[stevo1210]

Re: Internet problems...

I think I'll just use washus suggestion to run an external cd drive and reinstall windows... There's a bunch of registry errors on bootup which may also explain these issues?

[willawake]

Re: Internet problems...

need to nlite
4gb is very small

[kaniki]

Re: Internet problems...

the other thing that nobody noted, usually there is a place to connect extra ROM's on the board and extra power supply connectors. If worse comes to worse, you could always open the computer up and manually connect a Rom inside, if nothing else, long enough to get windows installed. that is if the USB CD ROM does not work.

[ratdude747]

Re: Internet problems...

nlited xp sucks, btw. thats why i advised the use of ubuntu netbook remix... it was designed for one of those

[willawake]

Re: Internet problems...

why, there is lots of crap to remove. i have one friend still happy with nlited on 8gb eeepc

[washu]

Re: Internet problems...

You don't need to nlite or any of that. Just make sure your disk is slipstreamed with the SP you want. SP2 or SP3 as you desire. That way you don't have the SP uninstall files wasting space. Then delete all the patch uninstall dirs after running windows update.

If you do that XP will fit just fine in 4 GB if you don't load a lot of extra stuff. You can always compress some files too. With the slow SSD on the 701 that might actually make some things faster.

[stevo1210]

Re: Internet problems...

I installed a copy of Windows XP Pro slipstreamed with SP2 on that eeepc today, only to find out that there was a Windows XP home CD in the box!
Anyway, I'm not going to reinstall windows again just because of that. Everything works now, but I have like 1GB of free space left lol.
Not to worry, there is a 4GB SDHC card in there so we have more room now.

[kaniki]

Re: Internet problems...

one thing that you could think about doing for more room. If you dont have too much running on the computer (programs running in the background) and if you have large enough amounts of ram, you could always lower you amount of page file space and that could free up a little space if needed. but like i said, take into consideration the amount of ram before you do.

[NxB]

Re: Internet problems...

The 4g is spacious. The 2gb model is not. You even have to delete the install files for the drivers.

If you can ping but can't browse, its a DNS issue.

[stevo1210]

Re: Internet problems...

Um. I dunno if this is a good idea... but I turned off the paging file/ virtual memory completely because there isn't enough room. Instead I will add 1GB of RAM to make it 1.5GB of RAM... is this recommended?

So far, I see no perfromance differences with 512MB of RAM.

[stevo1210]

Re: Internet problems...

Actually, I take that back, I've had to re-enable the paging file, though only allowed to 128MB. This is because skype won't work...

[stj]

Re: Internet problems...

you cant turn it off anyway, you can only tell it your "preference",
it will still use it sometimes.

[kaniki]

Re: Internet problems...

actually, yes you can turn off the page file.. but not really recommended.. I was saying more like make the minimum amount to something like 100 MB or something like that.. You can turn off the page file but if you do and you run out of RAM, then your system is going to crash. On the other hand, if you are just doing small thing like the internet with it, 1.5 gigs of ram is more then enough and the page file will not be needed. but with 512 MB, i would definitely leave it on. The way windows figures the page file is that it starts at 1.5 times the amount of RAM installed and goes up to 3 times that amount installed. So if you have 512 MB, then the page file should start out at about 768 MB and go up to about 1.5 GB or something like that.