[Wireless NIC and request times out!]

Is the wireless in the laptop built in or a pcm card / USB?How old is the machine?How old is the card.

Is the router 11b or g? If b is the card backwards compatable to 11b standard? Usually they are, and usually auto cofig....but not laways.You say you have another laptop that works fine is that b or g? Are you trying to use both standards at once between the different machines and router?

The fact the ping is taking so long and timing out would indicate general connectivity issues perhaps to do with signal strength. XP if thats what you are using has an inbuilt site monitor / strength bar, if not present you can download a free version from just about any wireless supplier. What is the signal strength reading,strong, weak, intermittent etc. Might want to try changing the channels on the Dell to see if signal strenght improves.....

Are there any restrictions / filtering on the router. Is there any firewall software loaded locally interfereing.

Double check using ipconfig /all that the laptop is recieving the correct settings for DNS, DHCP, IP and in particular default gateway, though in truth as you are able to get web pages on occaisions I suspect these are ok. Perform the ipconfig /release and then ipconfig /renew to ensure functionality.

Diable any 1394 and ethernet connections.

Of course it could just be a failing NIC.....

[Win XP or Server 2003]

why would you want to run 2003 for a desktop?

[Cannot Update]

Have you actually gone through the windows update trouble shooter on the site, it has a list of error codes and related solutions. Might be worth looking in the log under c:\windows\windowsupdate.txt, in there it will show any potential problems encountered during updates as well as any other error codes. Once you've got those perform a search on site of in google.