I have installed a fresh copy of win2K on an old laptop. It has a netgear nic w/properly-installed driver, hardwired to my smc router. The problem is that I can't hook up to the internet with I.E. I tried to "Make a new Connection" using the LAN options but to no avail. I can also see a connection status which reads a signal. Is this and I.E. problem or network problem? Can someone help?

I think it's a networking problem. I was a bit confused by this when I recently switched from a broadband modem to a router but, as long as your network connection to the router is configured correctly, your laptop should have a valid IP address in the same range as the router, e.g. 192.168.1.2 and the "default gateway" should be the IP address of the router, e.g. 192.168.1.1. You can find out this information by going to the command prompt and typing ipconfig /all. Once the networking is correct, you should be able to ping an address from the command prompt, such as www.microsoft.com and you should also be able to browse to it through Internet Explorer with no specific settings. As far as Internet Explorer is concerned, you are browsing to a site on your local network - it's only the router that decides to retrieve the data from outside and fetch it back to give to the laptop.

Let us know if you have any more questions about that or, if that sorts it out for you, please let us know that we can close the thread