My father-in-law wanted more memory in his computer, we replaced a 256m with two 512m cards. When he first started his PC afterwards the task bar was nonfunctional/ He shut it down for about 15 minutes, it then boot and ran perfectly. We had a light storm blow through so he shut it down, now he is not getting an Internet connection. The cables are all plugged in, it is a DSL, they also have it running through a wireless router for a laptop. The laptop is connecting fine.
I am at a loss as to what to try to do.

Howdy suzuq and welcome to PCHF
When you went in and replaced the ram did you hit somthing? Maybe hit some wires loos inside the pc?

Also did you buy the exact same ram, as if you did not this could lead to problems

I wound up breaking down and calling our dsl provider and doing an ip release/renew and got it back up, do not know what or why it happened to need to do that but it worked thank u so much for ur imput!