Strange ping ...

I have an old Dell machine running Windows XP which attaches to my home LAN. This had been running fine for a year +. For reasons I don’t understand, the network connectivity stopped working yesterday. I had not changed anything (the LAN connects to a Router and has DNS enabled to provide each PC on my network with IP address).

The connection to my Dell is through a UBS/Internet connector (“EtherFastâ€) . To check that the EtherFast connector had not broken, I carried over my Portable Compaq PC and connected to the connector and had no problem being recognized on the network, getting IP address etc. I have carefully checked all the TCP/IP properties etc on the Dell and they are identical to the Compaq. In addition, I checked that the USB port on my Dell was still operative.

Now, here is the strange bit. When I "ping" the Router from the cmd prompt on my Dell, the dialog I get in response to >ping 192.168.0.1 is "pinging -- with 32 bytes of data" and then times out with no response (where "“ is actually an inverted triangle symbol and NOT the IP address I am pinging). Even when I do the loop back test (which does work on the Dell) with >ping 127.0.0.1 I get a message back with "pinging ** with 32 bytes of data" (where ** is another symbol). So, the only thing I have to work with to try & understand what the underlying problem is is this weirdness I get when I try "pingingâ€.

Any ideas/suggestions would be very welcome !

 

Hi PMS and welcome to the forum.

What you are seeing is probably early signs of the power supply starting to go bad. USB networking seems to need more power to function properly than most any other USB device. I dunno why since I am no sort of hardware guy but it's a fact.

Depending on the age of the PC, the expense of a new power supply might or might not be worth it to you. And one of the hardware folks can chime in here - there may be an easy way to reduce the power demands on the system so the USB networking piece will work for a while.

One minor note - IP addresses are provided by DHCP. DNS is another thing altogether.