I have a laptop that was given to me. I am trying to get it on the internet. I am connected and the home screen comes up, but when i click on anything i hear a system error chime. I can not close the screen with doing CTRL-ALT-DELETE and choosing the task manager. I tried to ping the system and it tells me that the IP address is a series of the letter F and some periods.

Moderator Edit: Moved topic to the more appropriate forum. ~ Animal

To answer your question:
For external IP lookup, you would need to access the internet and navigate to a page like http://whatismyip.com/

For internal IP lookup (if you are on a network), you can run ipconfig from the command prompt.

About the connection issue:
I could easily be wrong about this, but I suspect that the home page is loaded from cache, and your not really connected to the internet.

Whats the make/model of the laptop?

What is your connection? ADSL wired/wireless, dialup, etc?

Does CTRL-ALT-DELETE work at all, ever?

If you bring up a command prompt in a stable state and type ipconfig /all, what are the results?

If you have a router, are there security settings that you need to authenticate with your laptop (eg MAC address filtering)?

Is there security software installed that might it be stopping you from accessing the network for some reason? Try disabling it temporarily and see if you can connect.

When you "ping the system", what exactly do you type?

thank you for your response, i am new here and was not sure that i posted correctly. Okay my connection is a wireless router with a usb stick. it tells me that i am connected and i can view the webpage but i can not click on any links or change pages. Yes control-alt-delete works everytime jsut getting to be a hassle. The lap top is a gateway solo5300 with windows xp. When i ping the system all i type in is Ping when i click on start then accessories then command prompt. when i try ipconfig/all the ip address is listed as fe80::ffff:ffff:fffd%5 about the router i have disabled the firewall and minimzed all security settings allowing all content until i can get this resolved. i think i have answered all of your questions i appologize if anything is left unclear. if your still willing to help i can answer anything else you need. thank you again.

Hi . It sounds very much like you are really viewing an old cached web page and are not really connected to the Internet. Try empying your browser cache and try again to go to your home page. If you get the message "This page cannot be found" then you are not connected.

Make sure your networking device in Hardware Manager does not show an exclamation mark or a red X. Either indicates that the device driver is not installed or working properly. You may have to locate and reinstall its driver again.

Once you are sure that the driver is properly installed then run the Network Setup Wizard.
Control Panel > Network Setup Wizard
Choose "This computer is connected to the Internet through a residential gateway (aka Router) or through another computer on my network". Go on and choose the default setting for the following questions. When that's done restart your PC.

Once booted up again try to access google.com, yahoo.com or some other URL that you know. Once you know this is working try to access your home page.