I will be happy to engage in troubleshooting of a TCP/IP over wired Ethernet network for the fee of $50.
As part of my portfolio, I offer the following story: I was helping a friend get their computer working in their dorm room. They had all the settings correct, but they couldn’t access the internet, it seemed. First, the site that provided their homepage wasn’t operating (it had been out of commission a few months, but they hadn’t used that computer to access the internet much during the summer). Second, while it seemed like they could ping various machines, the DNS seemed to be intermittent, at best. As it was a Windows machine (which I dislike), they actually needed their WINS setting set a little differently in order for it to work. The pinging and DNS seemed better, but pages loaded incredibly slowly. Then it hit me: their ethernet cable was probably too long – their dorm was rated a “ethernet hubs not guarranteed to work here” and I suspected this was because there was a long line from the jack to the nearest router/switch. We used a shorter ethernet cable and voila – everything worked.
I’d be happy to do that again, but I’d rather not work with Windows machines – too often they used NetBIOS even when they say they’re using TCP/IP, and I’m not about to debug the insanity that is associated with NetBIOS.