Are you connecting the PC's one at a time?  You know that you can't connect
two PCs to a cable modem at the same time without the router.

The adapter address FF-FF-FF-FF-FF-FF is the MAC address of the network
card which is unique to each network PC card.  Some broadband ISP's assign
their IP addresses to only one MAC address.  That is why most routers let
you "Clone" your network adapter's MAC address to the router so your ISP
thinks it is still talking the original network card.  My original ISP did
that and I had to call them if I changed network cards so they would
recognize me as an authorized customer.   It may be that your ISP has
recorded the first PC's MAC address and doesn't recognize the second PC's
network card MAC address as one of their customers.  If this is the
problem, you may have to clone your first pc's MAC address to the router.

Doug


At 7/10/2003 10:58 PM, Michele wrote:

>I'm left with another problem now though. Since I'm waiting on my new router
>to arrive through the post, I thought I'd connect this particular pc
>directly to my external broadband modem now,  to enable me to download
>anything now rather than later.
>Although in the past, I have connected this pc to the internet via usb
>broadband, I have now installed a NIC and connected it via ethernet.
>The first pc connected to the net fine, no problems at all, just a rebooting
>of the modem, but with the other pc, I'm getting the error message that 0
>network adapters are set to DHCP (have I got that the right way round?)
>They are both identical cards, bought at the same time, which leads me to
>wonder whether the pc is still playing up.
>I have worked out that it's something to do with the computer not getting
>the correct IP address, because all goes fine with the broadband install
>disk, until it tries to ping the server. An IP address has been assigned to
>the pc, but it just doesn't seem right for some reason.
>The adapter address is something like: FF-FF-FF-FF-FF-FF.

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