Today I'd like to share with you some light ideas about network troubleshooting in Windows XP.
Most of your network connection issues can be fixed with an very enigmatic command called “Repair”. You can find this by clicking right mouse button on network icon at System Tray area. Please take a look on a picture below.

This is very common solution. But what if this icon cannot be accessible for some reasons?

Before my explanation I’d like to remind you an old technique to create a DOS batch file. A DOS batch file is a list of commands grouped in one file with extension “.bat”. Usually you execute in a single DOS command in a command prompt. If you have to do a few of them at once you must do that one by one.  Instead of this you can create a simple text file where you list commands to do. After finishing just rename your file for i.e. mycommand.txt to my command.bat.

Let’s take a look how we can fix our networking problem with a small DOS batch file. Below you see a list of prompt line commands.

@echo off
arp -d *
nbtstat -R
ipconfig /flushdns
nbtstat -RR
ipconfig /registerdns

So, fill your repair.txt with these commands and close with .bat extension like this example:


For explanation what individual command stands for please read this followed Microsoft Technet Library example:

ARP - displays and modifies entries in the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) cache. The "–d *" switch deletes all entries of IP addresses.

NBTSTAT - displays NetBIOS over TCP/IP (NetBT) protocol statistics, NetBIOS name tables for both the local computer and remote computers, and the NetBIOS name cache.
The “-R” switch purges the contents of the NetBIOS name cache and then reloads entries from the Lmhosts file and “-RR” switch releases and then refreshes NetBIOS names for the local computer that is registered with WINS servers.

IPCONFIG - displays all current TCP/IP network configuration values and refreshes Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and Domain Name System (DNS) settings. The “/flushdns”  switch flushes and resets the contents of the DNS client resolver cache.

I hope today tip will be useful for you.


Happy learning :)