Yay, hooray! See this post? It's coming from my LAPTOP. The Recovery CD that I ordered online, that has the necessary drivers and whatnot, appears to have done the trick. I can now get online.

Now all I have to do is install, AGAIN, all the freebie software I used to have on the laptop before the hard drive went kaput.

Oh, and I'm SETTING UP THE BACKUP PROCESS for the machine this time. I am NOT going through all this freaking "start from scratch" agita again.