I have internet connection from my neighbour who has ran a cable from his router to my place. But if I insert the other end of the cable into a router at my place there is an error of IP Conflict and neighbour looses the internet service and has to reconfigure. And of course, I have to disconnect the cable from my router. It works fine if i connect it to a standalone laptop or desktop.

As I cannot use my router, I cannot use wireless access on my laptops, iPad, iPod, iPhone etc.

Is there any around it which I can do at my end without involving the source (neighbour is not very helpful)?

a) router works fine with every other device (and with Linux on same computer)
b) router has not updated firmware in quite some time nor any config changes to it, the ISP settings, the network devices other than the problematic computer, and the problematic computer itself (that I know of, see below)
c) this is Windows XP

Now, what is unknown at this point is whether there was yet another 'helpful' update/patch by the quality-driven folks at Microsoft that could have changed the problematic computer.

However, I foolishly fired up Windows Update to see a history. Well, again, the quality folks at Microsoft decided that if you don't have an net connection in order to perform updates then 'logically' you must not want to do anything else related to Windows Update features. In this case, a historical review of updates.

I am hoping now my wife will listen to me and turn off automatic updates. Time will tell. :)

After waiting awhile from entering 'ipconfig /renew' we get amongst the various useless lines of error messages, the following, "unable to contact your DHCP server, request has timed out."

Now, yesterday I rebooted the router and it 'might' have fixed the problem temporarily but its hard to pinpoint that because of the massive amounts of the 'standard Windows fix' of rebooting happening around the same time. However, if that truly fixes the issue then that logically means there is something wrong with Windows (shock and alarm and surprise!) not working with standard protocols and methods of networking.

My problem is I can only use the IP address which is allotted by the service provider. Apart from that, I am unable to use other IP. If I try to do so, I get the internet for about 1 min only.

Please help me!

I have a problem renewing an IP address. When I type ipconfig/renew, an error comes and says, ''An error occurred while renewing interface local area connection: unnable to contact your DHCP server. request has timed out."

That is all that I have. And I still can't renew the IP address.