Sudden wifi problems: can connect to router, but no internet connection

I'm hoping you guys can help me out with a frustrating problem I've been having for the past day or so.

About 6 pm yesterday evening, I was watching Netflix on my Wii when it suddenly experienced connection problems. "No surprise," I thought, since it had been raining/storming lightly that day and it could have been a temporary problem. I checked with my laptop and iPhone and, while both of them were connected to the router, neither of them had internet access. Whenever I used Chrome on my Macbook, I would get a "DNS lookup failure" error page. I connected my laptop directly to the ethernet cable and to my surprise, I received a perfect internet connection.

I have been using this router (Linksys E1200) for the past six months without a single problem, so for the first time since I set it up and after unplugging it numerous times, I typed in the router's IP. Strangely, since I'm the only one with access to the router and didn't change it, the default "admin" for username and password did not work. I reset the router back to the factory settings, setting the router name and WEP passcode back to what it was previously. Still, no dice.

I think it should be of note that when I accessed Network Utility, I was still receiving and sending packets, but at an extremely slow rate (sent and received 2 about every second). However, when I pinged "www.ebay.com", all of the packets were lost.

Can anyone figure out why my wireless router suddenly decided not to function?

If your connection is good via ethernet, that eliminates any ISP problems. It does sound like your router may have take a trip "south". But to be sure, access the router and run the internal diagnostics (if provided) to see if it comes up with an error. Also check to see what DNS settings are being shown by your router.

One more thing... if you get back up, change your security from WEP to WPA2. WEP is easy to crack and can sometimes cause connection problems.

See, I was thinking my router might have died as well, but I tried out my old Belkin that I had retired once I got my hands on my Linksys router. It didn't not function at first, giving me the same DNS lookup errors I got whenever I tried to use the Linksys router. However, after editing some minor information (the time zone settings) and clicking "Apply Changes", the Belkin router sudden worked perfectly again.

I tried the same with the Linksys. I changed the time zone settings, rebooted, and voilà, my ISP's service asked to register my router as a new device. It's now up and running just fine again.

I'm not sure just what in the world I did, but I'm glad it worked. That ethernet cable I was using wasn't long at all.

Oh, and no worries, I said WEP when I have WPA2/WPA mixed.