So I'm away at University, and I have a laptop with Vista. The LAN isn't working for me, but I know the server isn't down because it's working in my neighbour's room. I can connect wirelessly to the net, as I'm doing now to write this, but I don't like it because it's not secure and it's a lot slower.

When I plug the ethernet cable in and go to the Network and Sharing centre, it shows the "map" thing as having me connected to the gateway, and then an X between the gateway and the net. I'm assuming this has something to do with being unable to resolve DNS.

I went to the command prompt and typed in ipconfig and it showed that for the LAN, it was "Media Disconnected".

I'm really not that great with computers, totse, and nothing came up when I searched this; would you be so kind as to help me out, or point me in the right direction in terms of search results? Thanks in advance.

https://www.totse.com/community/announcement.php?f=160

If the icon has a red X, you are not connected to jack shit.
Is the ethernet wire plugged into something?
^ Usually that is what is meant by media not connected.

Try again with a real operating system.

No, it's definitely plugged in.

Have you tried a different cable? or different jack? like your neighbor room or something or maybe another plug that is meant for ehternet?

Yes and yes; it's definitely something wrong with my computer.

Go to device manager (windows button, rightclick my computer, manage, then click device manager). Do you see any yellow question marks or exclamation points? Under Network Adapters, is there a circle with an downwards pointing arrow in it, over any of the icons? If either of these circumstances are true, you either need to install/reinstall network drivers, or you simply have to enable the interface.

If the above is not the case, then assuming your cable is good, you have a dead network drop and need to contact your schools IT department, to find out why it's down and/or how to get it working.

I found out what it was, now. My school's network quarantined my port because apparently I have some Botnet shit on my computer. I don't have the software necessary to deal with it so I had to pay them to do it and it's taking 2 days Fucking trojans

So much for McAffee, I guess I'm going AVG from now on

The routers at my work do that. One day the configurations got fucked up, and periodically the "network cable unplugged" error would pop up, even though the cable was very much plugged in.