Having Real Difficulty Making My Old Laptop Connect To The Internet

[MaiDong]

My old 6 year old laptop, used mainly for downloading and watching movies died today, I took it to the local fixer and they told me windows was 'sia'(sad/dead/unfortunate etc), they reinstalled XP again and saved all of my data but when I got home I couldn't connect it to the internet

I have had this problem before, I moved my laptop from one house to another and the same thing happened, luckily I had the cash to buy a new laptop but I still wanted the old one for the tasks I mentioned before, unfortunately I couldn't get it working then so I just left it a few months until one day I plugged in the USB cable from the modem and the internet came back!

I've got no idea how this happened but was grateful to the gods for letting me download onto the old dog again!

This time I don't have the time to wait for it to decide it wats to work again so I really need help!

It's an old Novatech custom build from the UK but all of the components are Fujitsu, Sony etc, it's running on XP and I'm using TOT 1mb with a Speedtouch modem and an SMC wireless router, the router is used by my new laptop with wireless but before today the old laptop was connected to the Speedtouch modem via USB and I've tried the same connection plus a few others that may have worked but I STILL can't connect!

Please please please someone help me

EDIT/ I should have mentioned that I've called TOT and they are baffled, I should also mention that I can get internet but it's as slow as an old goat and most of the time the pages don't load in time before they've timed out, I have checked the 'Local Area Connection Status' and the activity shows that a total of 38 bytes( suppose that's what they're called) have been sent and a grand total of 2 have been received, it's normally in the tens of thousands...

I have turned off all firewall processes and anything else that may have been slowing it down...

Edited March 21, 2009 by MaiDong