[shane_c]

We purchased a Dell Inspiron 560 desktop about 3 months ago. It has Windows 7 and has been working great for the first 2 months. The last month I have been having intermittent issues getting online. It can’t pick up a network connection on the ‘home network’ so goes to a ‘public network’ and doesn’t find anything. If I run a diagnostic it says network cable unplugged even though it’s not. If I go into ipconfig there is no default gateway showing. I don’t have a router, it’s direct from the modem to computer.

I have made several calls to my provider and they say everything looks good on their end but they came out and gave me a new modem just incase there was an issue with it (but it wasn’t). I called Dell several times. We reinstalled the drivers, tried to do a system restore but got an error, sometimes when you load in safe mode with networking it connects but other times it doesn’t. If it does connect in safe mode and I restart it will connect in normal mode. They think it was a conflict between Norton 360 but I uninstalled that and still couldn’t get online. Dell says the next step is to do a PC restore but I don’t want to do that because I’d have to back everything up and start fresh again. I looked on the computer this morning and it said there is a Service pack 1 update available so I installed that but don’t know if it will make any difference. I did some searching online and it seems to be a common problem with Windows 7 but I haven’t really found any way to fix it. Any ideas?