[Frankiexxxafied]

Recently I decided to try and build my own computer. I ordered
all the necessary parts for it from newegg, and I got my last part
which was the power supply today. I hooked everything up, it
was much easier than I expected. I had no problems with it at all,
I installed windows. Everything went smoothly.

After I installed windows the first thing I wanted to do was get the
internet working. With a linksys router, I also have this linksys
wireless USB adapter. Instead of a network card, I'm using this.
I installed the software required for this device, and I connected
to the router, but I can't use internet explorer because it tells
me the page cannot be displayed. I've also tried logging into
windows messenger and that didn't work either, so the problem
can't be with internet explorer. It tells me I'm connected and it
also tells me my signal strength is excellent, why it doesn't
work I have no idea!

One thing I did notice though. This computer I'm on now runs the
same software as the one on my new computer. When I goto
the settings through the software I'm missing a DNS address and
a default gateway address. On this computer, it's not missing
these addresses. This caught me and I thought this might be a
problem. My internet protocol options are trying to obtain these
addresses automatically, but there is an option to use your own,
so I wrote down the ones on this computer and manually inserted
them on my new one, but no luck. I must be missing something.

Someone from a different forum told me to ping a website, so I
pinged google. It told me I received packets from the ping, and
I tried IE and it worked! I downloaded some programs to get started
up, and my internet stopped working... I rebooted, 3 minutes later
the internet stopped working again. Rebooted AGAIN now I'm back
to square one and it won't work at all.

Please help, I've posted on 2 other forums + various friends don't
know what's wrong.

[Sin]

There is some info missing, but I'm not going to ask you for it. Better yet, just tell you how to go about getting it working.

You need to configure your router. You didn't mention if you did or not, just that you installed wifi software. You can't configure it through wireless, you have to use a network card and cable to plug into the port of the Linksys router to configure it. That may be your first problem. Second, you need to clone the MAC Address. Your ISP gives you one public IP Address. Now, if that address was used with another computer that you had set up, with no router, then your ISP has the MAC address for that machine in their table, and that's what they're giving access to. You need to make sure that you tell them another mac address. Use the mac address of the new computer you've built. Once you've done this, go ahead and plug a network card into the computer and just plug your cable modem into the computer to make sure it works.

After that, hook the router up and plug in your pc, and access the router. There will be an option in the LAN configuration tab that lets you clone the mac address of the pc you're using. This will allow the router to use that mac address, and the public ip you've been given will go to the router. Also, the default gateway and dns will go to the router as well. When you have computers plugged into the ports of the router, it will use DHCP to give you the ip address, dns, and default gateway will be the router itself for the local computer, while the router uses the actual gateways given by your isp. This should be all you need. After this setup, then you can use your wireless nic to connect to the router.