i have the connection but i cant use internet explorer

my frist post man and i need help my laptop has been through hell and i have had to use the restor disks many time now i have a cable internet connection and it show up on the lap top but i cant conect to any inter net sites i just keep getting nothing so i tried to truble shoot it and went to repair the conection but i got an error that said
"The following steps of the repair operation failed:
Renewing the IP address,
Flushing the ARP cache.
Please contact your network administrator or ISP.
then i found this forume and saw a post that had the same problem it involved going into run and typing netsh diag gui but it didnt seem to help after it scaned all it told me was internet explorer web proxy is not configured so what im basicly asking is how do i configure internet ezplorer or what eles might work.

under IE tools have you tried setting it to default. also are you going straight thru to the net via cable modem or are you going thru a router.

if you are going through a router please list what kind it is also try hooking directly up to the cable modem if you are through a router another to try would be to update the lan drivers or uninstall and re-install them