i have disconnected the hard drive, the cd rom drive, and the floppy, so its none of these, and nothing to do with software, there has no new hardware been added,
It's a cable modem
I understand where he is coming from. If I get this correctly he booted the trouble machine with out the hard drive or cd-room connected so it just stopped at a bios screen and it still messed up the internet connection. That is very strange indeed. My only possible solution is that the network card on that machine is bad. It is sending bad sync packets or somthing like that and is causing normal communcation to be interupted. Try replacing the network card on that machine. If it is built-in to the motherboard just add a new one and plug into that. See if that fixes it.
It sounds to me like there is something wrong under your network connections. go into the command prompt and do a netshfix, this will reset all your network settings to the default settings. make sure you reboot after doing this before trying to reconnect, I would also suggest doing a powercycle before restarting the comp. after doing the netshfix. (If you dont know how to do a netshfix just email me and I will send you further instructions)
Didn't he say he powered up his machine without the hard drive attached and just it being on still caused the problem?
i have disconnected the hard drive, the cd rom drive, and the floppy, so its none of these, and nothing to do with software, there has no new hardware been added,
well i tried a wireless usb device, and still had the same problem, and yes you are right, i have stated more than once that all the drives are disconnected
