For about two weeks I have been unable to connect my wireless Lenovo laptop to the Internet. The computer recognizes the three major wireless systems I use and will connect to two of them, but it will not make the conection to the Internet beyond the LAN. At home, it won't even connect to the system. It recognizes the system but won't make the connection, even though the router is working fine. I took the laptop to tech support at one institution, and they ran some tests, even connecting to a line to see what was happening. They were unable to resolve the problem, though they did say it appared that the computer won't recognize the IP address, and gets an error message 169(I think). Does anyone know what I might be able to do? The computer is pretty much worthless without this ability, which it had and which was working just fine till suddenly . . . Thanks!!

Which Lenovo model do you have?
You might benefit from signing up with a Thinkpad users group such as

http://stderr.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/thinkpad or search for

Thinkpad forums.

Some of the Lenovos have fairly special ethernet equipment, for which it takes some special experience, or a tech. These people on these forums are all specialized in various Thinkpads.

ok, you take your laptop to multiple locations with different network settings
going beyond the lan (ie its router) requires a proper DNS setting
this might be an SSID or preferred network setting.

1) go to View Network Connections, right click on the WiFi adapter, go to properties
2) pull down to TCP/IP and be sure that you have DHCP for both IP and DNS
3) use the Alternative tab and delete ALL settings there

this will allow you to connect to ANY router and get the proper IP/DNS associated with it.

use your Wireless Wizard to set preferences for your networks.

Lastly, your firewall should be set:
#get dns and ip config#-> allow tcp outbound any-destination-ip ports 53,67
#allow browser access#-> allow tcp outbound any-destination-ip ports 80,443
#allow email client#-> allow tcp outbound any-destination-ip ports 25,110,143