how many times do i have to 'acquire the IP address'?!

This has been happening for many, many months and I'm about to murder my computer.

shortly after we received our first high speed internet (at&t dsl) here at home it started acting up. About every ten to fifteen minutes it will say it's acquiring the IP address...yet again...and nothing can be done online while it does this. I can NEVER even get through an entire youtube video unless it's 2 minutes long at best!!!

After it started doing this my wireless gave up too. I bought a linksys that was working just fine until this IP address crap started happening and I thought it was just the router...so i bought a new one...a Zonet one...and it won't work either. So...I thought it was just the modem then. I called support at AT&T...and I won't ever do that again. "Oh, just plug all your cables in again and it will work"...riiiiight. Thanks a lot.

My computer is a Dell Dimensioni E520 running Windows XP and my stupid little dsl modem is a Siemens SpeedStream 4100.

Someone told me awhile ago that it could damage the modem if the power was effed up and we did have one power surge awhile back when the computer was on...don't know if that would have anything to do with it.

I also have the Shield Antivirus 2007 which seems to be a peice of crap because I just ran on online scan through Panda security software that found 26 spywares and 3 hacking tools...it removed the spyware but I don't know what to do about the hacking tools. FREAKING COMPUTERS!!!!!!!

If anyone could help...you might save the life of a computer today.

thanks! =]

 

Dont assign a statip ip to a dynamic connection, that wont work. First remove any routers or what not and connect directly to your dsl modem to check if its a router issue or an isp issue.