Hello - despite my general IT cluelessness, I have been happily using my wireless broadband connection for a year. Now I've moved house, and when I try and connect to my new flatmate's network, I get the 'limited or no connectivity message' which won't repair itself at the prompt, and gives me a 'not recognising the IP address' message. The signal is good. I think this is probably a basic problem, and if I had an idea about where to start, I could follow instructions. I'm running Windows XP. Your service comes glowingly recommended by a friend, I have high hopes! Many thanks ...

Hi and welcome to D-A-L

have you asked it to search for wireless networks, it may be looking for the old wireless network.

It may be that your PC has a fixed IP address that doesn't match with your new flatmate's address range. An IP address is a unique number that identifies your PC on a network or on the Internet. Just like a postcode. If I tell you that I live at number 72 and my postcode is SW8 5AB, then the postman knows exactly where to find me if you want to send me a letter. Likewise, if your network (or the Internet) needs to communicate with your PC, it needs to know the PC's address in much the same way.

So, the message that you are getting is either telling you that your address is wrong or the address that it thinks the wireless network router is at is wrong. Probably the latter actually. So, as Brain_Damage said, you need to search for the network that you are now trying to connect to. Normally, Windows XP does this automatically when you switch it on. Does it come up with a message in the bottom right corner of the screen saying "New wireless networks detected"? If it does, click that message to connect to your new flatmate's network. You'll need to know the encryption key (the "password" for the wireless network) if it has one.

Let us know how you get on

Thanks for that - it's working now, although I'm not quite sure what i did. I fiddled with the settings on the Netgear adapter wizard, and changed it from 'create with passphrase' to 'enter key manually' with the code, and that did the trick. Hurrah!