Hi. The laptop is a Toshiba, not sure what model. My father in law is over helping me fix up the house and he told me last week that his internet connection at his house keeps dropping out. He uses Charter and has a cable connection. He uses a wired connection. He said the connection works great right after a restart of the PC but soon after that all connection activity drops.

I had Charter up until about a month ago until I bought a house in an area with FIOS from Verizon so now I use that. But I knew how crappy Charter was since I'd used it for years so I immediately assumed it was something with them and told him. He said he'd already put a signal booster in and had Charter come back. He said they checked the line and replaced the line going from the telephone pole to his house.

But the problem continued and today he brought it over to my house. Well after about 15 minutes on my own connection, all internet activity on the laptop ceased to function. I am posting this right now on my PC which is working fine, while the laptop is on the same connection and not working. I installed a couple spyware and virus scanners and it had no viruses but a lot of spyware. Removing them didn't fix anything though. Anyone have any ideas what the problem could be? The PC uses Windows XP.

Also, I can't ping anything from the command prompt but IE and Firefox both work (right now, because I just restarted it).

could be a faulty nic port or cable. I would uninstal in device manager and allow to reinstall at reboot (get new drivers first if you can)