People have all kinds of nerdy reasons that they may need to reset their TCP/IP Stack. For me, I was unable o connect to Games for Windows Live. But if you ever find yourself offline and stranded with not internet connection except the browser on your smartphone, it may be a good idea to try resetting your TCP/IP stack!
All of the nerds and geeks on the internet will just tell you that, matter-of-factly, without ever telling you how. Here are some very good basics that you can try to troubleshoot yourself, when you don’t have internet access, network connectivity isn’t working, or when some things work and somethings don’t. Why do these features get so messed up? The world may never know. But it’s good to know there’s a few things you can do to try and fix it, apart from rebooting your modem and router! 😉
The following assumes you have at least local Administraor rights on your computer (most people do, to the distress of millions of IT folk).
First: Reset WINSOCK:
XP: Click Start, then Run, and type in CMD and press enter.
Vista/7: Click Start, then type CMD (in the Search Programs an Files bar at the bottom) and press enter.
This will bring up a familiar black Command Prompt Window. In there, type the following, and press enter:
netsh winsock reset
After rebooting the computer, see if that helped. No? Alright, that was just the WINSOCK portion of things, now let’s try resetting the whole TCP/IP stack.
Open a command prompt, same as above. Then type the following as a single line:
netsh int ip reset c:\resetstack.txt
And, of course, reboot the computer. Did that help? If not, then at least you can say you’ve tried – but I was lucky and this resolved a very strange issue for me where literally everything else I was trying was working, except communicating with the Games for Windows Live service, which is why I have to give credit for the inspiration of this post to a user who calls himself “eastmanblues” on the Xbox Live forums.