Connectivity problem HP and Vista

Hi people, I am a newbie, and I just bought a new HP Pavilion dv6375us Entertainment notebook which came with Windows Vista Home Premium. Everything was fine, and the Internet was working blazing fast - it is an Ethernet LAN connection that my apartment provides.
I don't know what I did wrong, the only thing I did was try to install SuSE Linux on the machine along with Vista - a dual boot. But ever since, my Internet Explorer refuses to open any web pages. I talked to HP Tech Support guys and they said an OEM and another OS won't work together, so I ended up restoring the notebook to factory settings - still to no avail.
Another thing I had done was to use the wonderful partitioning manager Vista comes with to create many drives and some free space on the hard disk. The linux was then installed on the free space. After restoring the system I deleted that partition, but nothing seems to happen.
This very connection, this very Ethernet cable works just fine with my old laptop - as I keep switching the cable between the laptops hoping in vain that it will work again on the HP!
Any help will be deeply appreciated. All I can think of now is try to delete all the partitions on the disk and restore it to factory settings again.
The IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are assigned very well, and there doesn't seem to be any problem with Vista itself.
Waiting anxiously for some advice on this most grave affair.

 

I'm not a vista user but here is a few thing to check.

If Vista has a system restore, try backing it up to when it was working.
And check hardware device manager, to make sure the drivers are installed.
The security center, make sure you are not blocking the port (FW).

 

Thanks a lot for your interest and help. Well, I restored the system, but the Internet was still not working. So I shut the notebook down for a couple hours, and then when I restarted it, the Internet started working! The Norton Security that came with the notebook installed some updates, prompted me to restart the machine, and the connection was gone again. This is what has been happening lately - it comes and goes, while the connection stays stable on my old laptop (the same connection).
It crossed my mind that perhaps the Norton firewall and Windows firewall are conflicting each other, so I uninstalled Norton, but the Internet isn't up yet... do you by any chance have any experience with a similar situation?

 

I will not use Norton on any thing. It requires so much resources it's rediculus. I would recommend unistalling it completely. In order to do that you must down load a utility to remove it off your machine. The Un-installer does not remove it. It's setup so it can jump back it at a moments notice. One thing you must be aware of with Norton. I have seen this many times. If it's subscription expires, instead of just stop working it screws things up where your pc will never be the same. SO do your self a favor and get rid of it now, your PC will thank you. And it will run twice as fast.

I use Comodo for my FireWall and Avira AV both of these are free, and require little resources.

 

Cool, I un-installed Norton and Symantec totally following on-line instructions. But the Internet still does NOT work. The HP Total Care window says I am connected to the Internet, the Device Manager says the network adapter is working fine, the ipconfig thingy shows IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for the notebook's Ethernet port; but the browser doesn't open anything. When I diagnose connection problems it says 'cannot connect to primary DNS 198.162.1.1 - repair LAN adapter' and no matter how many times I repair it, it doesn't help.
In the meantime, the same Ethernet RJ45 cable stays alive and strong on my old Dell.
You know what, while I was installing SuSE, I had to disable native SATA support in the BIOS, and that time while installing the Linux complained of no Internet... and the problem has been there ever since. However, I deleted the Linux partition manually only after the system recovery... so right now I am doing another system recovery, and then we shall see.
Quite a wonderful weekend, eh?

 

It's possiable being a new NB it just failed.

 

Man, you are NOT going to believe this. I just noticed that on HP it says DNS 198.162.1.1 - unable to connect. When I do an IPConfig on it it again shows the DNS Server as 192.168.1.1
Next, I connected the Ethernet cable back to the old laptop, did an ipconfig, and it was showing a couple of IP addresses of DNS servers - not 192.168.1.1
So I went back to the HP, reconnected it to the Ethernet cable, typed in the same DNS Server addresses in the LAN connection settings, and voila, it works! I am writing this from my HP :-D It made me so happy!
Oh do you have an idea how to fix this permanently?

 

all right blue68f100, thanks for your help. I found the answer here:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/columns/cableguy/cg1005.mspx

Scroll down and read 'note' - that's EXACTLY what was happening. Vista comes with both IPv4 and IPv6 enabled, which messes up the whole domain name resoluting thingy.

Just in case some of you might want to switch to Vista, this conflict with DNS can happen - so you need to disable IPv6.

Tech Support is crap. Google is better. With some patience and common sense :-D

Have a great day!!