just got a roomate, and he has a netgear RP614v2 router. If we hook it up we both get the "limited or no connectivity" message. Tried reseting everything, but to no avail. The biggest problem we have is we cant even ping the router. Im lost for solutions, tried changing ports and cords but nada.

Make sure it's configured as a DHCP server and it's handing you guys IP addresses via DHCP. If you need to connect to it to configure it, you should be able to set a static IP and connect to it that way. Quite a few routers have a default IP of 192.168.1.1, but I'd double check with the manual to be sure.

The support page:

http://kbserver.netgear.com/products/rp614v2.asp

You can download the reference manual from there in pdf.

In your place I would:

1. do a hardware reset on the router (to clear custom settings and the password). Check the manual how to perform a hardware reset.

2. Check the manual for the default IP address of the router (I think it is 192.168.0.1 with 255.255.255.0 mask in this case).

3. change the IP address settings on the computers to something like 192.168.0.x (any number between 2 and 254 in place of x but each computer with a different one) with 255.255.255.0 for mask and 192.168.0.1 for gateway.

You can later switch to auto TCP/IP config by using the DHCP server of the router but imho it is better to have fixed IP addresses for troubleshooting.

Now, if you did all this then you can try pinging the router or try to access its http based config tool via a browser (simply type in http://192.168.0.1/)