My mom's laptop is fucked up.

[Bobbias]

Apparently as far as my mom's Dell Inspiron 1525 thinks the DNS servers are down. They are not (hence why I am able to post this from my laptop, connected to the same network).

This is kinda a big issue, since my mom uses her laptop for work.

It connects to the network perfectly fine, but only has local access. On top of that, pinging anything other than the router results in 100% packet loss. Including pinging it's own LAN IP address.

Pinging the DNS servers returns a proper response, curiously. I've flushed the DNS cache with no change, I've renewed the connection, with no change. I've rebooted the router, and the computer, with no change.

I'm at a loss for what to do.

EDIT: Apparently this happened just after she installed a bios update from dell. One of their programs came up saying there was an available update for her bios, and I told her she should update, because it's always good to be up to date.

[Spectere]

I've seen malware do that sort of thing quite a bit.  Try running Malwarebytes and ComboFix on it.

After you make sure that the system is clean, reset the Winsock catalog by typing the following in a command prompt (if she's running Vista, make sure you start the command prompt in administrator mode): netsh winsock reset, then reboot.

A BIOS update absolutely cannot cause something like this to happen.  The BIOS is only really used for hardware initialization.  Modern operating systems access the hardware directly, effectively bypassing the BIOS (this is why getting Windows to run on EFI systems, like the MacBook, is just a matter of booting the OS differently).

[Bobbias]

Well, after I posted this, my mom called dell support. The first person she talked to went through a dumb little checklist of everything I had done before (pinging the router IP, pinging 127.0.0.1, and a bunch of other crap) and proceeded to put her on hold. I had to leave to do some work at my grandmother's, so I missed the latter part, but whatever happened fixed it.