I Need Instructions walk me through hold my hand on how to ENABLE my Ethernet connection on a dell computer.?

Question

and NO it is NOT ENABLED BY DEFAULT.

Windows XP, but I DOUBT which ever Operating System I'm Running has anything to do with it.

To get help from Dell you hafta pay $99.00 per call OR $299.00 for 1 year.an NO WAYYY am I gonna do that.

Answer 1

I have owned several computers and set up several others. I have never had to do anything special to enable the Ethernet connection on the computer. If this is something specific to a Dell (which I have never owned, although their corporate office and a gigantic factory are just down the road from my house) you should be able to get assistance on the Dell web site.

Answer 2

I would recommend doing this in 2 stages:

Stage 1 to determine you have an ethernet card installed and don't have any errors associated with it:
1) Start Button
2) Control Panel
3) System Icon (using Classic View)
4) Inside the system window select the Hardware Tab from your selection at the top
5) In the top third of this window find and select the Device Manager button
6) In the Device Manager Window you will see several expandable catagories, are any of them already expanded with an item showing a yellow '!', a "?", or a red stop sign?. Hopefully the answer is no. A yellow '!' means a bad driver, a '?' indicates windows could not detect the device properly thus a driver was not loaded for it, and a red stop sign means the item has been disabled.
7) Verify that your system has a catagory listed here called Network Adaptors and that the catagory is not expanded. If the catagory exists and is not expanded it is saying there is a port and a driver installed, if this is the or one of the catagories that is expanded when you open the device manager then refer to #6 above. If you don't have a catagory named Network Adaptors then you don't have a network interface card installed in your machine.

Stage 2, assuming everything is fine is stage 1 listed above:
1) Start Button
2) My Network Places
3) From the quick options on left side, select View Network Connections.
4) In the Network Connections window do you have any listings? If yes, do they say Connected, Firewalled? If yes, then the problem might be a software issue where a firewall is on lockdown preventing all network traffic in or out of the machine. If your Network Card says Disabled, right click the connection and select the first option which should be Enable. If the system is unable to Enable the device, right click and attempt repair. If the system is unable to repair it, you might have to purchase and install another network interface card.

Answer 3

It's enabled by default. Unless you've done something to manually disable it it will work as soon as you connect it to an active network port.

Answer 4

well i guess this would really depend on the operating system wouldn't it?