My laptop is not speaking to my desktop, or, more probably, my desktop is not speaking to my laptop. And hasn't for about a week. Gah!
I even bought a brand new network cable, and still it is not working. The wierd thing was that it worked briefly once when I'd been rebooting and poking and forcing for a while, but now even the "force" method isn't working and I'm completely baffled.
1) I know that the laptop network card is perfectly okay, because my laptop does talk to the network at work perfectly okay
2) I didn't change anything! Apart from upgrades, and that just means that both the laptop and the desktop have the same software and drivers and everything.
3) Both systems appear to find and detect their own network cards with no problem.
4) Could they have sold me a dud cable? But the old cable doesn't work either, and it used to work in the halycon days of the past.
THIS IS JUST SO MADDENING! ARRRGGGHHHHHH!