Ethernet issue on laptop

[SeasonalEclipse]

Okay.. My wireless on my dell notebook works just fine.. Iv used it to get onto some friends networks and such.. but last night I decided to hooke up a cat 5 cable from my cable modem to it.. the light on the ethernet port was a yellowish orange.. and it kept saying.. trying to get address from modem.. or something.. before I guess it timed out and said there was little to no signal.. BUT it works just fine on my desktop.. so what could be the issue?

[ErikD]

Could be that the modem had "learned" the MAC address of your desktop, and wasn't letting the laptop connect.

Try to turn off the modem for a couple of minutes, and then turn it back on and connect the laptop.

[skidooosl]

what ErikD said.... do that and you should be all set

The reason the color changes is because your modem is 10Mbps

[FireMogle]

At work I have seen alot of dells will drop their Eth into power saving and kind of kill it for awhile. Check the power saving features and ethernet setting to make sure those are off.