RTL8139 adaptor on HP G5000 laptop

[gazz]

got puppy 3.1 on a usb flash drive, t works fine on the desktop machine, first time i loaded it, did the auto dhcp thingy and it got on the wired network straight away.

running puppy on the laptop, a HP G5000, new 3 months ago,
it detects the network cards, the lan is a RTL8139 Family PCI Fast Ethernet card,
the wifi card is a broadcom jobbie, cant recall the name right now, but i have a usb wifi dongle too, yet to try,

anyhoo, i do the test, it says it's found a live network (says that even with no lan cable plugged in!)

i try the auto detect dhcp settings (letters could be wrong way round, but i hope you know the thing i mean)

does the 60 second timeout, can't connect,
i tried entering the ip addy's manualy, wont connect,
my brother who set the network up tried, no joy,

tried wireless, it wont even pick up our wifi network, in windowz vista it picks it up straight away wth a 95% signal level.

Any ideas what's going wrong??