I just recently purchased a previously used laptop an Acer Aspire 5600 with 1.5gb ram + windows Vista upgrade. I am having difficultly connecting to the internet. I keep getting sent to the wrong IP address (169.254....). I've tried about a dozen things to fix this and none have worked thus far. I was curious if anyone had any tips on what I can do to fix this error. I have stopped the firewall, reinstalled the ethernet drive, recycled the modem, released and renewed the IPConfig and about half a dozen more techniques. Please give me some help or I'm going to end up breaking this thing....

Is this on all networks or just your home network? Is this using wireless or a wired connection? If its a wireless connection do you have the wireless security configuration correct, ie. network SSID, encryption type and encryption key? http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/columns/cableguy/cg0406.mspx Have you seen this article concerning the DHCP Broadcast Flag? http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233/en-us

169.254.x.y addresses are from Automatic Private IP Addressing (APIPA). With this feature, a Windows computer can assign itself an Internet Protocol (IP) address in the event that a DHCP server is not available or does not exist on the network.For instructions on how to turn this off see knowledge base article 220874 "How to use automatic TCP/IP addressing without a DHCP server".http://support.microsoft.com/kb/220874