Trouble connecting to home wireless network

Hi Folks:
I am having trouble connecting to our wireless internet home network with my new Toshiba Satellite laptop.
The network is a venerable Linksys WAP54G access point, not quite a full router, as it does not have a firewall and does not assign static addresses. It allows a dynamic address. It is very basic WEP security. We have a Dell laptop with XP which operates off it just fine.
When I attempt to connect with Windows 7 on the new Toshiba Satellite, it will identify the connection as public and connect, but activity is limited. It says it cannot establish an IP address. However when I connect with the built-in Ethernet port and a cord, it’s fine. Just the wireless part is giving problems.
I have read of one solution for this apparently not rare problem. This is to go into the Device Manager, find the wireless adapter, open it and click on the Advanced tab. This produces a list of properties. Find the property called “Network Address,” and put in the physical address of the wireless adapter found in IPconfig/all. However when I go this far, I don’t even have a property called Network Address, so I can’t do this.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks very much,
wayrnayn

Thanks Zigzag 3143:

I am not running Homegroup, as this is apparently best between computers similarly running Windows 7. I have however identified it as a home network. I can in fact connect to the other laptop using an ethernet cable, and can even access the wireless network through the other laptop XP sharing function. It's just accessing it on my own with the Toshiba Satellite that is giving me grief.

Here is a list of the advanced properties of the wireless adapter:

Thanks Doc...

I have tried playing around with inserting the gateway address and IP address of the access point into my wireless adapter's settings, with no luck so far. Any more specific directions?

I just had a discussion with our internet provider. He made the interesting point that an access point is transparent, doing little more than changing the internet to wireless. He said that once the XP laptop assigned itself an IP address, another laptop couldn't do so.

However, I remember pretty clearly that we used this same access point at my place for a while, and we had two laptops (both with Xp) going on it.

Any thoughts?

myzr7:

At this point, I haven't upgraded the software in the access point, which has been re-set to factory default many times. I'm not quite sure yet that this would be the issue; I think it's my Toshiba laptop.

Your access point needs a router in order to use DHCP. The access point alone is not enough to have a network. You have the equivilent of a wireless switch but without the router it can't make DHCP ip assignments. Doesn't matter that it worked before, wireless access points need a router in order to work properly.

You need to plug your access point into a DHCP capible router or into a wired switch which is plugged into a router, either way you need a router in your network. :)

chev 65:

Thanks for your suggestion. I do in fact have an old non-wireless router, so I might try plugging the access point into it. I'll let you know.