Belkin Router and Homeplugs
 

Please be gentle - I'm a complete technical numpty.

Got myself a nice shiney new laptop so that I could move around the house and still have intenet access. I'd tried a wireless network for 2 PC's some time ago and gave up!
You can imagine my delight when a friend loaned me two power plugs and explained how easy they were to set up. I was even more delighted when I plugged everything in and it actually worked. So far so good. Delight turned to dismay when I tried to power everything up the following day only to find I had no internet connection on the laptop. I have rebooted, switched cables, to no avail. The router is showing an amber light on the port which is connected to the PC - the PC still has internet access. It used to have a green light on the port connected to the powerplug, but somewhere along the line I've lost that.

Tried Belkin customer support - I really don't think the bloke had a clue what I was on about. He suggested it was the network card in the PC that might be faulty, however I switched to an old PC that has a relatively new network card in it and the problem is the same.

Any ideas? This is more frustating than if it had never worked at all.
TIA

Re: Belkin Router and Homeplugs
 

Tried another port on the router...

If its the same as my belkin switch Orange means 100Mbit/s Green means 10Mbit/s

I would have thought the ports on the homeplug would be 100Mbit/s unless its an old homeplug....

Maybe try looking at the ports themselves (you might need a torch) see if theres anything obviously wrong with them, Its not unheard of for the little metal contacts to spring out of place and short, or get bent.

Is the homeplug thing powering up ok, does it have any lights on it at all?

Re: Belkin Router and Homeplugs
 

The ports should be OK they hadn't been touched since it worked. The plugs are Solwise PL1-14PE ones. My friend only stopped using these because he got some faster ones. I wondered if one of my cables was a bit iffy but I've swapped them around all over the place and it's still the same. Shame the guy at Belkin and the one at PC World didn't know the bit about the orange light. I've switched to various ports on the router but the orange light follows the PC cable.
My Internet Provider is Virgin Media - could that be a problem - they don't seem to be very good at anything at the moment!

Re: Belkin Router and Homeplugs
 

Vm shouldn't affect anything on your LAN....

Have you tried loading the software to monitor/manage the homeplugs (assuming the one connected to the computer still works...

http://www.solwise.co.uk/net-powerline-pl-14pe-eu.htm

Re: Belkin Router and Homeplugs
 

I looked at that but didn't get the bit about running it as an administrator. The PC is running XP - so do I still need this?

Another thing that is happening on the Laptop is that a Pop Up keeps appearing wanting to dial broadband:confused:

Re: Belkin Router and Homeplugs
 

If your not an administrator account under xp then you need to right click it and select run as.
If yours is the only account then you will probably be an administrator anyway, theres another type of account on XP called "limited user" which can limit you from installing stuff.etc

As to the wanting to "dial" broadband did you either have ADSL using a usb modem or dial-up in the past?

If so its probably set to "dial" whenever a connection is not present.

If you load internet explorer then goto tools > options then press the tab for connectivity and one of the options should be "never dial a connection" that should help.