cannot seem to connect (it figures...)

[Vicki]

I recently received a Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop. Since I
only have a dial-up connection and I want to use this in a
room where there is no telephone jack, I needed a long
phone cord to connect the laptop to the phone jack. I
attached the 50' cord to the laptop last week and all went
fine connecting to the Internet. However, I cannot seem
to make the connection again this week. I enter the
password and it dials (pulse!), and the box
says "connected to remote computer", then "verifying name
and password", then finally "unable to establish a
connection". I thought that it may be the length of the
cord, so I used the cord that the laptop came with. Same
result. Then I moved to another phone jack in another
room. No luck again. Then, to make certain that it
wasn't my ISP, I turned on my desktop computer and easily
accessed the internet using the same info (dial-up number,
etc.). Can anyone tell me what may be the problem with
connecting my laptop to the internet? As I said before, I
did it last week and it connected witout a problem (same
settings, etc.). As I am quite new to this, could anyone
please give suggestions? Thanks!