I have a Toshiba laptop with Windows XP, and it recently crashed. I brought it to an old mate who knows a lot about computers and tried getting my documents back but he was forced to reformat everything and i lost everything. Now that's not the biggest deal. my problem is that now its been reformatted, the internet isnt working right. I have a wireless ADSL connection which works weird. Internet explorer doesnt work at all, but I have an old version of Opera (another browser) on CD so that usually works for most websites, but a lot of the sites such as gmail.com only work some of the time. Also MSN messenger doesnt sign on, and Gmail Notifier only works a fraction of the time. Also, when I updated Opera, it didnt work at all, so I had to uninstall and re-install the old version.

How could any of this make sense, and how do i fix it? :hrmf:

have you got an ethernet cable connection on the modem?

has it been loaded with a legit copy of XP?

yes i believe it has an ethernet cable, and not sure about windows version - but I have Toshiba programs already on here so im guessing it is?