Strange problem of lacking the internet.

Ok I'll start from the beginning,we have two pc's in our house, mine upstairs and my dads downstairs which acts as a gateway for me. One day he crashed and had to reboot, ok so I lose the connection while he reboots but when windows loads there are no connections whatsoever, they are there and the modems display says it's functioning fully but the network is obliterated and there is no internet access. We called out our isp (ntl) and he had a look at it and tried hooking my pc straight to the modem and *tadaa* it works fine, so there is summit on the downstairs pc thet is causing the hiccup. the ntl man had seen this before but never figred out a solution so we took the pc to our local tech shop while my pc stayed hooked straight to the modem, the guy there took it in and later managed to connect it to the net after various virus scans (we use avast and apparently it didn't pick them up) so we took it back and hooked it all up then I proceded to turn off the modem and switch it back to my dads pc and put my pc back into his NIC. his pc works gleefully and connects to the net fine, and at first it seemed everything was ok, I could see his shared folders and he could see mine, plus the gateway icon had appeared in the network connections on my pc. BUT my pc won't connect to the net. everything states that it is working except that I have no internet access (just so you know we aren't running any firewalls at this time so it's not that). When my dad picked up the pc he asked what had been used to detect the virus and bought it, it's called bullguard and is nice to use. So we unplugged dads pc and hooked mine up to the modem again and everything worked fine. We registered the new virus program on my pc and scanned, it picked up a couple of viruses but still we have no change soooo. Does anyone have ANY idea whatsoever? we assumed that my pc had caught whatever my dads had but apparently that's wasn't the case as the scan had proved. the network works fine but the internet does not. Any ideas guys?

You need to set up ICS on your Dad's computer. Then turn on and set up a firewall whether it be the XP one or a software one like zonealarm.


My advice is to get a router and hook that up to the modem and then yours and your dads up to the router. It will act as a firewall and protect you a lot more than you are without a firewall which in todays world is required. It will also have an added benifit of you not needing your dads computer to be turned on to get the internet.

yeh ICS is setup already, otherwise I wouldn't get the "gateway" icon on my pc would I, yes I know i should get a router im getting one soon, look im not that baisic, i've tried all the simple things, now I need some advanced ideas.

Are both machines XP? If so did you install SP2? If So SP2 turns on the MS firewall which could be blocking you from getting net.

no we are both on sp1, just out of curiosity, is sp2 really all that bad?